


Into Ruins

by LizAna



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bellarke, Canon-Typical Violence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Season/Series 02, Reunions, Romance, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-03
Updated: 2015-05-05
Packaged: 2018-03-28 18:58:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 31,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3866077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LizAna/pseuds/LizAna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellarke! After 2x16 Clarke returns to the abandoned ruins of Tondc, but finds she isn't alone. At Camp Jaha, Kane sends out a diplomatic party to meet with nearby grounder villagers and Bellamy takes the opportunity to go out and look for Clarke. Lexa has plans for the people of the Ark, the peace they had during the alliance forgotten as Clarke still hurts from Lexa's betrayal. (also posted at FanFiction.net)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The sun was starting to drop behind the mountains when the blackened ruins of Tondc came into view. When she'd walked away from Bellamy at the gates of Camp Jaha earlier, she really hadn't known where she would go, only that she couldn't be there.

She'd been walking for about an hour when she'd realized she'd started on the main path through the forest that led to the abandon remains of grounder village and then she hadn't been able to think of going anywhere else. Considering all she'd done in the past weeks, it seemed fitting that she should be alone at ground zero of one of her darkest moments.

After blasting the dropship rockets and killing three hundred Grounders-though she'd reasoned that away with self-defense and not having a choice-she didn't think she would ever feel worse than that moment she'd seen the charred bodies and comprehended exactly what she'd done. But she'd been wrong, and proven that to herself over and over, the justification of doing what was needed to save her people leading her further and further down a dark path there was no coming back from.

The lengthening shadows cast by the setting sun across the ash-dusted crater in the middle of Tondc threw everything into sharp relief. She dropped down to sit on a chunk of broken concrete, wrapping her arms around herself as the coming night-chill made the air bitter.

She wanted to blame Lexa or Cage for the loss of life, the destruction of this once-thriving community, if only to make herself feel even the slightest bit better—but there were so many souls weighing on her conscience, the burden of those who'd died in Tondc probably didn't make much difference. But no matter how many times she replayed that day in her mind, considered other choices she could have made, it all brought her to the numbing conclusion that she wouldn't have done things differently, not if it had meant risking Bellamy.

Apparently she could stomach the deaths of hundreds of innocent people to a point, but the thought of anything happening to Bellamy made her want to curl up in pain. But after Finn, who could blame her? Bellamy was the only thing left she had to hold on to from before, the only thing that reminded her that once she'd been a normal girl, living in confinement on the ark and dreaming of one day seeing the ground, never having a clue what a nightmare it would all turn out to be.

And that was partly why she'd had to leave Camp Jaha, and leave him. She wasn't that girl anymore and never would be again. She didn't know what or who that made her, the only thing she knew for sure was that it hurt to be there with them all in a life she could no longer have.

A scuffling noise sounded behind her, and she shot to her feet as she spun around, pulling out the gun she'd brought with her—the only thing she'd brought with her.

A Grounder crouched at the rim of the crater, leaning on a machete and staring at her with a blank expression. He was dressed a little differently to other grounders she'd seen, his clothes a little lighter and less bulky, despite the cold weather. He had a tattoo extending up his neck and cutting over the line of his right jaw, while his ear-length hair was a mess of dreadlocks and braids interwoven with beads. He didn't look that much older than her, certainly no older than Bellamy.

After everything that had happened with Lexa, and everything that happened before the alliance, she had no doubt that more than a few of the grounders wanted to kill her.

"I don't want to hurt you." Her voice didn't exactly come out even, but she held her ground as he rose and took several steps closer. "I just want to be left alone."

"You're the girl- _Heda_ of the _Skaikru. Klark, sha_?"

"It's Clarke and I guess there's no point asking how you knew that." Between standing at Lexa's side and killing Finn, there probably wasn't a grounder on Earth who didn't know who she was.

Despite the fact she had her gun pointed at him, he walked closer to her, stopping less than three steps away. She wasn't going to shoot him, probably even if he tried something. She couldn't stomach anymore death.

"So when the _Heda_ of the _Trigedakru_ sounded the retreat, you ran away from your people?" His expression took on a condescending edge. "Is that how the legendary _Klark_ deals with failure?"

She lowered the gun, a faint echo of anger simmering underneath her weariness. "You don't know anything about me, so don't go making assumptions about how I deal with failure. Like I said, I just want to be alone."

Slipping the gun away again, she turned her back on him and returned to sit on the chunk of concrete, not caring if he rammed that machete right through the middle of her back. It was probably no less than she deserved.

"If you want to be alone, then _gonot_. This is my camp and I don't plan on leaving any time soon."

He walked past her, descending further down into the crater and then going over to where a makeshift camp had been set up between two leaning slabs of concrete.

The sight made the simmering anger burn upward, and before she even realized what she was doing, had shoved to her feet and followed him down to his encampment.

"You can't set up camp here."

He had his back to her, removing items from a bag he'd been carrying and not reacting in the least to her words, as though she hadn't even spoken. The anger sparked hotter and she grabbed his shoulder.

"Hey, I'm talking to you. I said you can't stay here."

He turned on her so suddenly, her heart slammed into her ribs and she took half a step back, but didn't get very far since he'd grasped her wrist in a bruising hold, keeping her close to him and the depths of a wrath-driven fire that burned in his dark green eyes.

"The alliance is over; you're not a _Heda_ of _Gonakru_ any more. You're just a girl, all alone in the _trimani_ with no say over anything, especially me."

He let her go with a shove, and she stumbled back a step as he turned to continue unpacking his sack.

She rubbed her aching wrist, glaring at his back. "Its disrespectful to those who died here, like sleeping on top of their graves."

He stilled, his shoulders tensing. "You aspired to lead us, but don't pretend you know anything about our ways or what we view as disrespectful."

He cut dark glare over his shoulder at her, slowly reaching out to wrap his hand around the handle of the machete where he'd left it sticking upright out of a burned log.

Was he going to kill her after all? A surge of fear burned through her like acid, but she clenched her fists instead of reaching for the gun again.

Blade in hand, he stepped closer to her. "Do you still wish to fight someone, Clarke? Take out your anger on me for the _Maunon_ who still hold your people?"

She crossed her arms, the tightness she'd been feeling in her chest since she'd pulled the trigger on Wallace returning to steal her breath for a long moment.

"The mountain men don't have my people anymore." She glanced away from him, but all she could see beyond him were ruins, ruins that she'd had a hand in creating. "I killed them all. I went into that mountain and killed every single man, woman and child, innocent or not, so that my people could walk free."

The grounder took a step back from her, and she looked back at him to find an expression landing somewhere between awe and disbelief on his face.

It was exactly why she wanted to be alone. The judgment of her own conscience—what was left of it anyway—was hard enough to bear without facing anyone else's. And this grounder looking at her like she was some kind of mythical warrior was worse than condemnation. She didn't deserve to be respected for massacring a whole entire people, she deserved to be shunned.

"I'm a killer. I kill people." The confession escaped, falling off her tongue with more than a little defeat in her tone. "Just like I killed the people in this village."

Those words seem to bring him up short, his brow creasing in confusion. "What are you talking about? I thought the _Mounon_ were responsible for attacking Tondc."

"They pushed the button to launch the missile." She crossed her arms, cold seeping into her blood. However, it didn't seem to be coming from the icy air, it seemed to be coming from within her. "But I knew. I knew it was coming and I didn't warn anyone. I could have saved so many people, but instead, I walked away and let them die. I might as well have killed them with my own hand."

The grounder moved all of a sudden, grabbing the front of her jacket and hooking a leg into hers, slamming her into the ash-dusted ground, knocking the breath out of her chest. He came down on top of her, pushing his blade into her throat.

"You. You could have stopped this? You're no warrior, you're a bringer of death."

She gasped against the ache in her ribs as her lungs started working again. "I know. Everywhere I go, everything I do, people die. Too many people."

The blade against her throat pressed harder and she felt a trickle down the side of her neck. His enraged expression darkened, his gaze dropping to where he held the knife. No matter that she'd fought so hard to survive, in that second, she wanted to die, just wanted the aching pain in the hollow where her heart and soul had once been to stop.

But he didn't swipe the knife across her throat. Instead, he muttered in a slightly different grounder dialect and shoved to his feet, stalking away into the deepening night shadows.

Coughing at the release of pressure, Clarke rolled over, clamping a hand on the small cut in her neck. It didn't feel long or deep, it was just a small nick, definitely nothing that would kill her.

Instead of getting up, she laid there, wondering how many other grounders had lain just like this, too weak to get up, watching everything around them burn, listening to the screams of the injured, maybe screaming themselves, praying death wouldn't take them, but wanting release from their pain.

She closed her eyes as the dark and cold seeped into her, her last companion as the haunted night shadows closed over her.


	2. Chapter 2

Clarke awoke to warmth radiating all along her side and the smell of meant cooking hitting the back of her throat, making her mouth water. She rolled over and shaded her eyes against the sun, already moving toward the west.

Glancing across the nearby fire, she expected to see Bellamy, but got a jolt of surprise when she saw an unfamiliar grounder sitting there. He lifted his gaze to her, dark green eyes catching the late afternoon light and everything came back to her. She wrapped an arm across her middle as the painful, aching void inside her returned. Would she wake up to remembering her sins and feeling that hollowness every single day?

"How long was I asleep for?" Her voice came out hoarse, and she glanced around for some water. But of course, she'd left Camp Jaha with nothing but a gun. The grounder had a canteen of water sitting next to him, but since last night he'd held a knife to her throat, it seemed pointless to ask.

"Last night and most of today," he answered shortly, leaning forward to check the meat cooking over the fire.

"Why did you come back?"

He cut her a brief, unreadable glance. "I told you, this is my camp."

Neither of them said anything as he took the meat off the flames and sliced it onto a wooden board. He stood and then glanced down at her. Some of her hunger must have shown in her expression.

"You want to eat, you catch it yourself. But you can use my fire." Before she could reply, he turned on his heel and walked over to sit on a short wooden stool under the shade of a shelter made from a wooden frame and draped in thick clothes, constructed in front of the leaning slabs of concrete like a second room added to the simple camp she'd seen last night.

"How considerate of you," she muttered, pushing unsteadily to her feet. Between sleeping on the hard ground and not eating since she-didn't-know-when, she wasn't exactly feeling steady.

Walking closer to where he sat, she grabbed the machete from what seemed to be its usual spot sticking out of the burnt log.

He stopped eating to glare at her darkly.

"I don't have anything to hunt with, so you can let me use your knife, as well as your fire."

He dropped his gaze, returning to his food, as if he couldn't care less.

She yanked at the knife, taking two tries to get it out from where he'd sunk it deep into the wood. Once free, she slipped it into her belt and then started climbing the edge of the crater, slipping on loose dirt and ash every now and then.

At the top, she surveyed the outer remains of Tondc in the afternoon light. A lot of the structures had burned, and it looked like anything salvageable had already been stripped and removed to other villages.

She stepped off the rim of the crater and headed toward the river. For a second, her mind strayed toward Camp Jaha, to what her mother, Bellamy, Raven, Jasper, Monty and all the others were doing right now. But she ruthlessly shut the thoughts off, especially as she recalled the look on Jasper's face after Maya had died, causing the hollow ache inside her to flare stronger for a moment.

At the river, she splashed some water on her face and took a long drink, cursing herself for not finding something to fill with water while she'd walked through Tondc. Not that she probably would have found anything considering how thoroughly it'd been cleaned out.

Once her head was feeling a little less woozy, she walked downstream a little way to where a small field broke up the surrounding forest. As she'd hoped, there were a couple of bunnies grazing in amongst the grass.

For a moment, she started at the small defenseless creatures, her empty stomach turning over at the thought of having to end their lives. For all that she'd done, killing a rabbit shouldn't have mattered. And it didn't. Was she going to let herself starve just because they were cute and furry?

She crouched low and shuffled into the clearing, getting as close as she could to the nearest rabbit before swinging with the knife. Which got her exactly nowhere. She tried several more times, growing more frustrated, more tired, and definitely more hungry every time one of those bunnies sensed her a moment before she attacked and hopped off to safety.

However, just as the fifth bunny went to flee, and arrow skewered it, pinning it into the ground and killing it instantly.

"If this is the extent of your hunting skills, no wonder you're so scrawny."

She glanced over her shoulder to find the Grounder from Tondc walking toward her. He didn't pause as he passed, yanking his knife out of her hand and then stepping over to jerk the arrow out of the ground and lift the dead rabbit.

"I'm not scrawny." She pushed to her feet, feeling more than a little defeated by the stupid rabbits and her inability to catch them. Truthfully, maybe part of her hadn't really wanted to catch one, despite how hungry she was. "I suppose I get to sit on the other side of the fire and watch you eat that too?"

He didn't answer as he brushed by her. She sighed, giving up on the idea of catching anything, especially since he'd taken the knife. Maybe she could find some berries or something on the way back to Tondc.

She followed a few paces behind the grounder as they headed back to the deserted village, cutting directly through the forest instead of going along the river as she had when she'd walked out.

When they got back, she returned to sit in front of the fire where she'd woken up, while the Grounder crouched a little way off preparing the rabbit. She would have to do something about finding some food soon, probably before the sun set, but just for the moment, she couldn't work up the motivation.

The Grounder moved closer to the fire, coming to crouch near where she sat as he added some logs to the fire and then set the rabbit up to cook.

"You said last night that you freed your people from _Maun-de_. Why aren't you with them now?" He asked the question in a low voice, not looking over at her as he did.

She stared at the cooking meat, juices starting to drip into the flames, unable to answer his question. Not because she didn't want to, just because she couldn't put the words together, and her brain was too fatigued to think about it any longer. That was why she'd come out here, so she could start putting it behind her—if such a thing was possible.

"Why aren't you with your people?" she asked instead, her voice flat.

He didn't answer, the only sound between them the cracking of the fire, hiss of cooking meat and birds beginning to chirp as the sun started setting again.

The grounder leaned over, pulling his bag toward himself before pulling out a large, dented flask. He unscrewed the lid and held it out toward her. When she didn't move to take it right away, he slowly brought the flask up to his mouth and took a short swallow, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as he offered it again.

This time, she did take it; curiosity getting the better of her since she got the feeling it didn't have water in it.

The liquid hit the back of her throat on a burn and then smoldered all the way down, leaving a sharp malted-syrupy taste in her mouth. She coughed in surprise, her eyes watering at the intensity of it. But it was good, so she took another mouthful. It hit her empty stomach with a jolt through her system as she handed the flask back.

"Thanks, I needed that."

He inclined his head, taking a second drink as he stared into the flames.

"I'm not with my people because they returned to the sea without me."

His words surprised her, and she turned to look at him where he was crouched next to her. "The sea? You're of the boat people?"

He nodded, taking another drink from the flask. "My younger sister had been taken into the mountain, she was meant to marry our commander's son. My father sent me and my brother with our _Heda_ to join this alliance and fight to free my sister. But my brother died in this village and my sister did not come out of the mountain with the others. When my people left, I couldn't go with them."

Clarke stared at him, taking in his profile, his expression both angry and lost, a little like she was feeling. He was tied to this village and didn't want to be, just like she was.

"I'm sorry." The words came out awkward and inadequate, and she wished right away that she had of stayed silent.

"Don't apologize for things you're not really sorry for. Don't fill the silence just because you feel uncomfortable."

He went to rise, but she clamped a hand on his forearm, stopping him.

"I am sorry." She said it with more conviction this time, feeling the helpless frustration of every turn she'd made that had brought her to this place. "I'm sorry if this burned out hole is all you've got. Everyone else could leave the ghosts here, everyone except for us. And that's not something I would wish on anyone."

For a long moment he stared at her, his face indecipherable, until he pulled his arm from her grip.

"The meat should be ready by now. Don't burn yourself when you get it off."

He stood in a fluid movement, skirting the fire.

"Wait."

He paused, glancing over his shoulder at her, expression tight, as though he hadn't liked sharing that small part of himself with her.

She swallowed down the trepidation that he might suddenly leave without telling her, the notion of being alone not as appealing as it had been yesterday.

"What's your name?"

At first, he didn't answer her, but then after a long second, his shoulders dropped a little, losing some of their tension. "Ashlan."

Before she could acknowledge the small admission, he walked past his camp, scaling the side of the crater a lot more easily than she had earlier in the afternoon.

She stared at the spot he'd disappeared for a moment, before glancing down at the meat. He didn't have to help her catch this, or cook it, or even tell her how he'd ended up in the ruins of Tondc. He had every reason to hate her, considering she was partly responsible for the death of his brother. So why had he done it, especially after she'd told him the truth of her actions?

Her dealings with Mount Weather and Lexa had extinguished the optimism inside her that people could be selfless for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. But as she took the meat from the fire, a small spark flared to life deep within her, proving that maybe she wasn't entirely cold and empty after all.


	3. Chapter 3

Bellamy stood waiting by the gate, pack slung over one shoulder and rifle strap riding over the other shoulder. Since walking back into Camp Jaha a few days ago, he'd had no reason to carry the rifle around; everyone was safe inside the fences, especially now that Mount Weather was no more and the Grounders were being amicable for the time being. He didn't want to know what it said about his sanity that without a gun in hand or slung over his arm, he'd been feeling kind of like he'd lost a limb. Maybe a shrink would tell him it was some screwed up kind of deferred emotion from Clarke not being here.

For the millionth time since she'd left, he wondered where she was right now. He didn't doubt that she was okay—this was Clarke, if nothing else, she'd proven that she was resourceful, and that she was a survivor. He understood that she needed time to come to terms with everything that had happened, everything she'd done and endured to free their people from the Mountain, but she wasn't the only one who'd been knocked down and hadn't gotten up as the same person. What he'd been through in that mountain, when the plan with Lincoln had failed and—

He swallowed down the tightness crowding his throat, making the next breath harder to take in. What happened to him in the mountain didn't matter. What mattered was they'd succeeded; Octavia and the rest of the remaining 47 were safe and back where they belonged with the rest of the survivors from the ark.

But he couldn't deny that was the reason he hadn't gone after Clarke, why he hadn't volunteered to go with her, or gone out looking for her in the days since. He didn't want to face what had been done to him and what he'd done in that mountain, let alone have anyone else know about it. If they knew, they'd get that look in their eyes, the same way they'd looked at him after his mom had been floated and Octavia locked up simply for being born. That look that said they pitied him, that he wasn't whole or something. Hell no, he wouldn't ever put himself in that position again.

He glanced over at Kane, talking to Clarke's mom a few steps away, just out of earshot. The two of them had something going on, something other than the explanation they'd given everyone for sending a "diplomatic" party out to talk with the leaders of nearby villages. Yeah, it made sense to scope out their neighbors, maybe set up some kind of trade deal for food and supplies, but he got the feeling that Abby had swayed Kane to use the excuse of journeying between villages to search for Clarke. Half the camp knew Abby would have gone out looking for Clarke the same day she'd left if not for the fact she'd been laid up in bed after having marrow removed inside the mountain. If not for the fact she was still recovering and the only fully qualified doctor, she probably would have slung on a pack and headed out with them right now. But Clarke had obviously inherited her loyalty and sense of duty from her mother, because despite her feelings on the matter, Abby wasn't going anywhere.

But if anyone was going looking for Clarke, then they sure as hell weren't going without him.

Kane reached out and gripped Abby's hand for a long moment, sending her a reassuring smile, before breaking off and heading toward the gate. As he got closer, Bellamy stepped into his path.

"You're not coming." Kane said, barely sparing him a glance as he took his pack from a soldier who'd been standing with the group waiting to depart.

"You need me—"

"We're not having this conversation again." Kane signaled, and the gates started swinging open. "I want you here, Bellamy. I gave you a conditional seat on the new council for a reason. The 47 listen to you, and people respect what you did to survive down here all these months. We need to start building a solid foundation—"

"And there are plenty of people here who can and are doing that. But that's not me. I'm not a politician, I'm the grunt. Put a gun in my hand and I'll join the security forces or send me out with the hunters to bring down a deer. But I'm not the guy who sits inside what's left of the ark everyday talking strategy and policy."

The group moved off and lagging behind for a moment was Octavia, sending him a triumphant smirk.

"You're taking my sister. Someone needs to watch out—"

"Your sister can take care of herself." Kane glanced over his shoulder, just in time to catch Octavia looking all innocent, like she hadn't just been rubbing his face into the fact she'd been one of the first people Kane had asked to accompany him. "She knows the Grounder ways and language better than anyone. She and Lincoln are our best chance of creating amicable relations with the nearby villages. Stay here, see to the tasks we've given you."

Kane started to step away, but Bellamy grabbed his shoulder to hold him back.

"I've seen you and Abby talking, and I know something's up. I'm guessing you've got a second agenda for being out there, one that Abby gave you. If you really think you've got even half a chance of bringing Clarke back, then you need me. She's not in a good place right now, she's not going to want to listen to anyone."

Kane turned to look at him, his gaze intent. "Then what makes you think she'll listen to you?"

Truthfully, he didn't know if Clarke would listen to him, but it was his only shot in convincing Kane to let him come. "Because my hand was on that lever too."

Kane glanced away, as if he didn't like facing the fact that he stood in front of someone who was responsible for the deaths of over five hundred people.

"Fine, you can come, but you do what I say and tell no one else, not even Octavia." Kane stepped out of his hold and then nodded to the men standing on the gate as he passed through, quickening his steps to catch up with the rest of the group heading down the hill toward the forest.

Bellamy glanced over his shoulder, not sorry to be leaving the confines of the camp. The ark had never felt like home, even when he'd been growing up. It certainly didn't now that it was on the ground in a crumpled mess. In the shade of one of the sections, Jasper stood staring at him, arms crossed and expression pensive. A chill trickled down his spine as he turned and headed out the gate. Jasper had hardly said two words to anyone since they'd gotten back, not even Monty. He'd taken Maya's death hard, becoming more and more withdrawn as the last few days had gone by.

Putting the issue of Jasper's broken heart out of his mind, he hurried to catch up with Octavia and Lincoln, walking in the middle of the group.

"So you got your way after all," she said as he fell into step beside her.

"There was no way I was letting you walk out of those gates without me. Kane has no idea what he's getting himself into by taking you along."

"Didn't you hear? I'm the negotiator." Octavia bumped his upper arm with her shoulder. Her expression was light, but there were still shadows in her gaze that hadn't been there before. Her appearance wasn't that of a naive, carefree girl anymore, and never would be again. A lot of small things had changed Octavia since they'd landed, but the biggest one had been the time she'd spent with Indra. She hadn't said much in the last few days, but he got the feeling that Octavia was hurting over the fact that the woman she'd looked up to had forced her to choose between them.

He sent her a half-grin. "Really? You? The negotiator? Then it looks like we're all going to starve to death."

"Yeah, well I'll make sure you run out of rations first if you don't stop breathing down my neck, big brother."

He adjusted his loose grip on the rifle, glancing over his shoulder to where Kane was bringing up the rear with another soldier. Kane had told him not to tell anyone about their search for Clarke, which made absolutely no sense. Wouldn't everyone be happy to see her back at Camp Jaha again? Besides, he'd never kept anything from his sister, and since coming to the ground, he'd learned that trust was one of the most valuable commodities.

"I know you can take care of yourself. Hell, you could probably kick my ass these days."

She shot him a self-satisfied smile. "No probably about it."

He sent her a quick yeah-right look in return.

"You know I didn't all but get on my knees and beg Kane to come just so I could watch out for you," he said, pitching his voice lower so they wouldn't be over heard.

She glanced up at him, dismay and something too close to pity in her eyes. "I know. And don't worry, we'll find her."

He nodded, because right then his chest was feeling a little tight, and he couldn't get any words out. Not for the first time, he thanked whatever powers had brought Octavia into his life, that he got the privilege of having a sibling, someone who would be there for him no matter what, and would always understand. He hadn't always done right by her, but he was always striving to do better.

She reached over and squeezed his hand, shooting him a confident smile, indicating the small group they were walking with. "Now, which one of these branwada do you think is going to irritate the Grounders the most?"


	4. Chapter 4

Bellamy trekked with the rest of their group into the outskirts of the village, tightening his hold on the rifle at the usual glares and wary looks from the resident grounders.

This was the fourth small village they'd visited in the last twelve days and their reception wasn't getting any warmer. Apparently the grounders had been willing to tolerate them while Lexa had commanded they had an alliance, but since that had all ended it seemed hostilities were slowly returning.

The grounder lines of communication were more reliable than the radios they'd been using to stay in contact with the ark. By the time they'd walked into the second village five days into their journey, all of the grounders had heard about their actions inside Mount Weather, and that the Mountain Men were no more.

The people in that village had treated them with grudging respect, but weren't willing to enter into any trade negotiations. Especially since their interpreters were Octavia and Lincoln. The Grounders had at least talked to Octavia. But when it came to Lincoln, they acted like he wasn't even there. Unless they were spitting on him, which had happened more than a few times in the past week and a half.

Bellamy didn't know how the guy could keep taking it. If it'd been him, he would have started punching people out around ten days ago. Lincoln's own people were acting like he'd betrayed them. And apparently in their eyes, he had in choosing Octavia and the _skaikru_ over his own flesh. There was no middle ground as far as they were concerned. Lincoln had remained stoic about it, eventually letting Octavia act as the go-between while he stood in the background, silently daring anyone to touch her so he could put his knife to good use.

After a few days of fruitless negotiations, they'd moved on to the next village, but by the time they'd reached it, the leaders of that village had been expecting them and hadn't even entered into a single conversation Kane tried to charm his way into.

So here they were, walking into another small village where he didn't expect they'd be treated any better. At least the grounders weren't outright threatening them. He supposed there were worse fates than being ignored. If their only reason for being out here was for relations with the Grounders, he would have started suggesting they return to the ark after the last village, as a few others in their group had.

But returning to the ark wasn't an option yet, not when he hadn't seen or heard any news of Clarke. He didn't want to face the truth that he was starting to get worried, his guts clenching every time he thought about where she might be—which was pretty much every other minute. The last three nights he'd barely slept, unable to close his eyes without seeing her walking away from him over and over.

He'd expected some of the Grounders might have seen her, because from her actions and all the time she'd spent standing beside Lexa, they all knew who she was, she wouldn't have been able to walk into a village without someone recognizing her.

The only answer he could come up with was that she'd gone to Polis, maybe gone back to Lexa, maybe went looking for an explanation of why Lexa had betrayed her after everything they'd accomplished together. He didn't like the thought of Clarke facing Lexa alone. In fact, he didn't like the thought of Clarke facing Lexa at all. When it came to the _heda_ of the Grounders, all he could really think of when considering Lexa was punching her in the face, which then left him feeling more than a little unsettled since his mom had always taught him it wasn't right to hit a girl.

Except Lexa wasn't a girl, she was a conniving, heartless, backstabbing bitch.

Nonetheless, he'd mentioned the possibility of Clarke being at Polis to Kane a few days ago, but the ex-chancellor hadn't been happy about the idea of going to the grounder's capital city. Instead, he'd told Bellamy they'd consider it once they'd exhausted all other options.

Frustration washed through him as they walked further into the village, Grounders coming out to watch them as they looked for the decorations on a shack that indicated it belonged to the leader of the community.

However, as they got into the middle of the cluster of huts, opening up into a wide grassed area that seemed to be some kind of town square, the number of Grounders seemed to increase all a sudden, leaving them surrounded.

Bellamy half stepped in front of Kane, bringing his rifle up, while on his other side Octavia pulled out her sword.

"Patience, Bellamy." Kane put his hand on top of the rifle, so he lowered it slightly, though he wasn't putting it down, not when the Grounders around them were all but bristling with antagonism.

"You're not wanted her, Kane of the _skaikru_." A man similar in age to Kane stepped forward, and a few warriors crowded closer to him, obviously prepared to defend the man.

Kane held up his hands. "We only came to talk."

"But we do not wish to hear you. And neither do any of the other villages in this area. You were warned not to proceed any further, but you chose to ignore this advice."

Bellamy glanced at Kane. "What's he talking about? What warning?"

"At the last village," Octavia answered. "They told us not to continue with our journey or they would put a halt to it themselves."

Bellamy shot a glare at his sister, before turning it on Kane. "And you didn't think to give the rest of us a heads-up?"

Kane didn't take his eyes off the leader in front of him, obviously trying for a friendly, non-threatening expression.

"I had hoped if we pushed on, we might find some open minded people willing to listen, despite the previous hostilities we'd received."

Bellamy brought the rifle up again to aim at the nearest Grounder. Damn Kane and his assumption that they'd all just go along with him. Half-truths and outright lies had poisoned the people of the ark before they'd come down. Had he really been naive enough to hope things might be different now they were on the ground?

"Fine, we can take a hint, we'll leave." He backed up a step, grabbing Kane with one hand and keeping the rifle up with his other. "But no one lays a hand on us."

The leader's mouth quirked up into an almost-grin, though the rest of his face remained impassive. "I'm afraid it's too late for that."

The grounder gave a single nod, and the men around them swarmed.

"Don't fire on them!" Kane yelled as the immediate area broke into chaos.

Bellamy cursed, yanking his finger off the trigger a second before he'd been about to blast a Grounder running at him. At the last moment, he swung the rifle around and smashed the butt of the gun into the man's head, putting him down and out.

He turned, finding Octavia and Lincoln fighting back to back, both slashing their way toward him. Kane was getting his ass kicked, so Bellamy waded in and grabbed the collar of his shirt, yanking him back a second before the Grounder who'd been pounding on him took his head off.

Bellamy thrust Kane toward Octavia and brought the gun up to block a knife slashing toward his face. While the Grounder was off balance, he kicked outward, catching the man in the mid-section and sending him stumbling, doubled over.

As he whirled around to face his next attacker, he realized it was futile. All of their group had been disarmed and subdued, except for Octavia and Lincoln. One of the men—Martin?—Kane often spent time talking with was lying on the grass face down, ominously still.

"Stop." Kane said, making Octavia and Lincoln pause. It was enough for the nearby Grounders to leap in and knock their weapons out of their hands.

Someone grabbed Bellamy, wrenching the rifle out of his grasp and then kicking him in the back of the legs, putting him down on his knees.

He glared up at the leader as the man walked closer to them.

"What are you going to do with us?" Kane demanded in a low voice.

"For now, you'll be locked up. But tomorrow, you'll be transported to Polis to face the _heda_."

Bellamy glanced at Kane, who stared back at him with dismay. If their fate lay in the hands of Lexa, then he had no doubt that they were totally screwed. Whatever respect she might have had for them probably ended with the alliance. Now they were simply intruders on her land, a mass of ill-equipped people looking for aid.

On the bright side, at least he was getting his wish and they were heading for Polis sooner rather than later.

The grounders got them up and led them to the opposite end of the square where grass gave way to mud. There were wooden cages, strewn with food scraps and hay, but otherwise empty. He assumed they were used for some kind of stock animal, until one of the grounders stepped forward and swung the first one open.

"You can't put us in cages!" He yanked against the grounder holding him, his heart hammering too hard and too fast against the inside of his ribs. For half a second, he managed to break free, but then a second grounder stepped over, grabbing his arms as the first one punched him in the stomach. He wheezed as the air was forced out of him, before gasping in an almost-as-painful breath. One of the Grounders grabbed a handful of his hair and wrenched his head back.

"You don't like the cage, _honon_ , I can put you in the ground."

A few of the other grounders nearby laughed, before they dragged him over to one of the cages and tossed him in. He landed on his hands and knees in the straw, stomach aching from the hit he'd taken. He turned over, watching as their group was split up into two cages. He let out a long breath of relief as Octavia ended up with him. Lincoln and Kane were put in the other cage, a few feet separating them.

Octavia came and crouched down next to him, brushing a strand of hair out of his eyes as he sat up with a grimace.

"What was that all about?" Her too-intelligent gaze searched his as she looked at him.

Right, 'cos he'd freaked out like a sissy when he'd realized where the grounders were going to put them. But after what had happened to him in Mountain Weather, he'd planned on living his life without ever seeing the inside of any cage again.

"Nothing." He winced and wrapped an arm across his middle. Hell, even talking hurt. That gorilla-sized bastard had rammed him good.

Judging by the look on Octavia's face, she hadn't believed his answer, but she didn't push him, just shrugged one shoulder and went to check on the four others in the cage with them.

Bellamy sighed and shifted to lean against the thick bars. This whole journey was going to hell. They'd found no sign of Clarke and the Grounders had reverted back to treating them like the enemy. Right now, the only thing stopping him from losing his crap while he was locked up in this cage was focusing on the hope that when they were sent to Polis tomorrow, they would finally find Clarke. And as much as he hoped she hadn't gone back to Lexa, right now, the chance that she had and might have some sway over the commander of the _trigedakru_ could be the only way they'd get out of this alive.

 


	5. Chapter 5

Bellamy sat along the side of the cage, boot propped up against one of the bars, with his arm resting on his knee, watching the villagers go about their business as he had for the last few hours since they'd been locked up.

Luckily the Grounders hadn't taken their packs, so they weren't starving or thirsty. Octavia had tried to get him to eat something before, but he'd just shaken his head at her, stomach still churning uneasily over the fact he was locked up in a cage again. At least this cage was big enough to sit up in without his head touching the top. At least when he got taken out of this cage, it wouldn't be to get stuck with tubes and hung upside down. At least this time he was clothed and for the most part knew all his friends were safe.

He crossed his arms, tight across his chest as a cold shudder ripped through him, while a clammy sweat broke out on his lower back. He had to stop thinking about it, had to stop replaying everything that had happened in the mountain. But with the bars surrounding him and nothing else to do, it was damn hard to keep his mind off it.

Instead, he brought an image of Clarke into his mind—it still hurt, and he was still worried about her, but it was less painful than everything else right now.

Night fell, the village getting darker, quieter and colder. Octavia came over and sat next to him, handing him a blanket and then leaning into his side. He flicked the blanket around himself and than dropped an arm over her shoulder, bringing her closer to share some warmth.

"Lincoln and I have been talking escape plans when they take us out of these cages tomorrow," she said in a quiet voice, despite the fact there was no one to overhear them.

"Yeah? And what did you and Captain Awesome come up with?"

She punched him lightly in the shoulder, but grinned nonetheless.

"We're thinking we'll wait until they've taken us at least an hour out of the village so their numbers will be smaller and they won't be able to get reinforcements easily. Then it's pretty much a matter of fighting our way free."

He nodded, apprehension tightening muscles that were already stiff from the cold. "Its not a great plan, we'll probably take casualties."

In the shadows, her gaze was grim as she looked up at him. "I know, but have you got a better idea? We can't let them take us to Polis. Who knows what the psycho bitch Lexa will do with us."

"What if Clarke is in Polis?" He voiced the question in a low tone, already guessing what his sister's opinion of that would probably be.

"Then she's a moron, as well as selfish. If she went back to Lexa after everything—" She reached out and took his hand. "You deserve better, Bellamy. We _all_ deserve better. Clarke isn't who you think she is."

From the tone of Octavia's voice, he knew he wasn't going to like whatever was coming next, but had to know either way. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"When the missiles hit Tondc—"

"I know, she went to warn everyone."

Octavia shook her head, anger tightening her expression. "She didn't warn _anyone_ , only Lexa. And then they left. Walked out on a village full of people and left them to burn."

His heart slammed to a grinding stop in his chest, making his whole body ache. "No, she wouldn't do that."

Not the Clarke he knew. Not the Clarke who would sacrifice herself if it meant saving the people she loved. That was the only reason she'd pulled the lever, to save their people in the mountain, not because she was a monster who could turn her back and let innocent people die.

"I didn't want to believe it either, but it's true, I saw her and Lexa on the outskirts of Tondc after it happened. She knew Lincoln and I were there, even her mom and Kane were there, but she didn't warn any of us."

She'd walked away on her own _mom_? Then there had to be something more to it. He pulled his fingers from Octavia's and dragged a hand across his face, tired all of a sudden to the point his head was swimming. He was so damn exhausted off all the secrets, the fighting, but most of all, the death.

How could Clarke have done it? He could see Lexa's hand in this. Clarke had fallen too far under the girl's influence, so maybe it wasn't as black and white as it seemed. The only thing they'd found since coming to Earth were shades of gray where right and wrong should have been. For all they'd been through, he at least owed her the benefit of doubt. He wasn't going to sit here and believe the worst of Clarke until he could ask her about it himself.

Movement beyond the cage caught his attention and he focused on the spot between a shack and a tree, where a form slipped out from the shadows. For half a second, he hoped it was Clarke, that she'd somehow heard about what had happened to them and came to bust them out. But as the figure moved stealthily closer, he saw they were wearing the usual furs and thick garments of the Grounders.

As the person snuck closer, he realized they seemed to be heading directly for him. He glanced over at Octavia who pulled a small knife from who-knew-where as she shifted into a crouch.

The figure reached the cage and kneeled down in front of him.

"You're one of those guys who finds trouble no matter where he goes, aren't you?" Her voice was familiar, warm with friendliness, but he couldn't work out where he knew her from. Studying what he could see of her face in the shadows didn't help one bit either.

"What's wrong, Bellamy, don't recognize me with clothes on? Maybe I need to stick myself with a few tubes—"

"Echo!" He sat forward, reaching out to cover her hand where she had it wrapped around a bar. Last time he'd seen her, he'd been letting her out of a cage in Mount Weather and telling her to prepare the rest of the lock-up Grounders for battle.

A small swelling of guilt knotted his insides because he hadn't given a single thought to her since he'd walked out of the medical lab.

"We really should stop meeting this way, with bars between us. Although, at least this time I'm not locked up as well."

He sent her an unimpressed look. "Sure make a joke, its easy for you on that side."

"Sorry." She glanced over her shoulder, checking they were still alone. "I couldn't come see you earlier, I didn't want to risk anyone finding out that I know you."

"And since you have come to see me, I'm hoping its to return the favor and get me out of here."

She looked back at him, her gaze hard. "As far as I'm concerned, we're already even. I helped you kill that guard, and you set me free."

He leaned forward a little farther, bringing his face closer to the bars. "Then maybe you could do it out of the goodness of your heart?"

She sent him a cutting grin. "Haven't you worked it out by now, _Belmoi_ , most grounders don't have hearts."

"Yeah, well I don't believe that, so find a way to get us the hell out of here before they take us to Polis."

She pushed back from the bars, before standing. "I'll see what I can do, but I'm not risking my reputation to save you. Everyone has heard about the _natrona_ who insults us by accompanying you village to village. If they find out I know you, even if I explained that you helped free me, they still might cast me out. The _skaikru_ are not welcome, you crashed your ark onto our lands and then expect us to accept the invasion."

"We took down the mountain men," Octavia snapped. "You think maybe a thanks would be in order."

"I'm not telling you what I think, I'm telling you what I'm hearing. The _heda_ has made a decision about you. Even if you escape before tomorrow, the _heda_ will come for you, and her resolve will be done."

Before either he or Octavia could say anything else, Echo walked away, disappearing silently into the shadows.

"So we help Lexa get her people out of the mountain and killed an enemy they've been fighting for generations for what? So she can declare war on us again and drive us off her land?" Octavia sat back, expression aggravated as she slipped the knife away again.

"I don't know. Maybe its not as bad as it sounds." Even he didn't believe that as he said it, and from the indignant look Octavia sent him, neither did she.

"Echo will help us escape." He didn't know that for sure, but he hoped like hell it was true.

"Sorry, Bellamy, but your grounder girlfriend didn't exactly seem motivated to help you, let alone the rest of us."

"She'll be back." He returned to where he'd been sitting before and adjusted the blanket around his shoulders, not that it made much difference against the biting cold.

"Let's get some sleep, whatever happens tomorrow, we're going to need it."

He closed his eyes on Octavia's skeptical expression, but of course right away Clarke burst into his mind like always. He sighed wondering for the fifty-millionth time where she was. Did she know Lexa had _made a decision_ about them? Had she had something to do with it? Was she off somewhere all alone regretting that she'd walked away from her people, from him? Or was she happy with the solitude she'd found?

The whirling vortex of unanswerable questions chased him into a restless sleep.

 


	6. Chapter 6

Clarke waded knee-deep into the calm waters in the sheltered section of river, pulling in the rope with the net attached to the end. As she hauled hand over hand, she kept an eye out for any dark shapes that might be those huge, black snake-like water creatures that had almost taken Octavia when she'd jumped into the river within the first few days of them being on the ground.

Ashlan didn't seemed fazed by the threat of them, often coming in the middle of the day to take a swim. She'd gotten into a routine of washing in this spot every day or so, but she never dared to go any deeper than her knees. She figured at least that way she could run from the water if needed.

As the net got closer, she squinted against the sun coming off the clear water to see that once again, the net was empty. When she pulled it all the way in, she found it had come apart, no doubt letting the fish escape. She sighed, and slapped the useless tangle of twine against her thigh.

"So your net-making and fishing skills are about as good as your hunting skills."

Clarke glared over her shoulder at where Ashlan on top of a flat rock, weaving dried, flattened reeds in his hands. Over the last two weeks, he'd proven to have quite a number of interesting skills and they'd fallen into a weird kind of companionship. He'd tried to teach her a few things, like making nets to catch fish, but she'd hadn't exactly excelled at it.

"I wasn't a hunter-and-gatherer after we came to the ground." She started sloshing back in toward the grassy bank.

He set his things aside and stood, before jumping lightly down to the grass. "Then what did you do?"

"I was the doctor, the healer." As she stepped out of the water, he reached out and took the net from her. With a few quick knots and twists, he'd repaired the thing and stepped into the water.

"Then that explains your inadequacies." He sent her a short grin and then paused to pull his shirt off, throwing it back toward the rock, before taking several long strides deeper into the water and then diving under.

"My _inadequacies_ saved more than a few lives," she muttered, moving to lean against the rock and crossing her arms as she watched him stroking confidently into the deeper, faster flowing water. Her heart rate picked up a little, her gaze scanning the water for any large, dark shapes. But whatever. If he was stupid enough to swim that far out, then the river lizards could eat him as far as she was concerned, she wouldn't be diving in to save him.

In a matter or minutes, he returned, dragging the net along with four decent sized fish in it.

"And that, _Klark_ of the _skaikru_ is how it's done." He tossed the net at her and she caught it against her chest automatically, getting soaked with fishy-smelling water.

She held the net away from herself and then plucked her wet shirt away from her skin with a grimace.

"Thanks for the shower."

Ashlan brushed by her and grabbed up his shirt, shrugging back into it even though he wasn't dry.

"What? You have some strange issue about water? Can't you swim?"

"Since I grew up on a giant space station, no, I can't really. But I'm more worried about the giant people-eating snakes."

He returned to the rock and gathered up the tools he'd been using. "The river monsters can't get this far upstream; the _trigedakru_ built a kind of dam a farther down to keep this section of the river safe for the people of Tondc to use."

She glanced down the river, but of course couldn't see anything from here.

"How do you know that? And why didn't you tell me sooner?"

"I saw it on my journey here. And I assumed you already knew about it." He stepped by her, heading toward the path that led back through the forest to Tondc.

"Okay, let's just assume for argument's sake that I don't know anything," she muttered darkly. The more time she spent on the ground, the more this fact became apparent. Growing up on the ark, that had been a different type of survival. It hadn't prepared her for any of _this_.

"I had already reached that conclusion many days ago," Ashlan called over his shoulder.

"How the hell did you hear that?" Not only did he have mad survival skills, but she was beginning to think he had some weird radiation super powers. He could definitely hear better than she could and managed to track animals from signs she couldn't even see. He'd given her a crash course in living and surviving off the land in the past few weeks, but it had been a struggle to retain the information when he mind was constantly dragging her back to the things she'd done.

Truthfully, coming across Ashlan had been a miracle, exactly what she needed, even though she hadn't known it at the time. Sometimes they talked, but it was about easy stuff, like the seasons or uses for certain plants, or if they were both in good moods, small tidbits from their very different childhoods. She still woke up to the same hollow ache every morning, and every day, she battled away thoughts of her friends and family, only to get swamped with the guilt and ghosts of all the people she'd killed. But there were moments—brief moments—that she forgot, that she didn't feel terrible, like a monster she no longer recognized.

They reached Tondc and returned to the semi-permanent camp they'd created in the crater. The third day, when it had become apparent she wasn't going anywhere, Ashlan had added another kind of 'room' to his shelter for her. He'd even made a bed, knocking together a wooden frame and weaving thick, tightly strung reeds for a kind of suspended mat. It had actually turned out to be pretty comfortable.

At first, she'd thought it was horrible to be camping and sleeping in the middle of the impact-zone where so many people had died by her failure to warn them. But then she'd somehow made peace with it, plus the crater was actually pretty sheltered, which was probably why Ashlan had decided to camp there in the first place.

As she set the net of fish down, Ashlan knelt to build the fire up again. He sliced a sideways glance at the fish near his knee, before returning his attention to the fire. "You want to eat them, you have to clean them."

"But you always—" She cut herself off. For some reason, he seemed to have made it his own personal mission to teach her all kinds of survival stuff. And the few times she'd been in a bad enough mood to complain about it, he always found a way to make the lesson harder or more prolonged.

Well, she'd seen him prepare fish a handful of times, surely it couldn't be that hard? She started to look around for the small knife he used on meat and then saw he was already holding it out for her.

"I intend to journey to a nearby village," he said as she took the knife and pulled the first fish from the net. She paused, the fish slippery in her hand, a whole range of emotions washing through her at his announcement, most of them featuring apprehension.

"When?" She tried to keep her voice calm and even, but probably failed. She'd just gotten used to him being around, and though he could be an impatient or unforgiving teacher, she'd been enjoying the simplicity of their routine and everything she'd been learning from him. She wasn't ready for that to end, and realized now that she really didn't want to be alone. However, she also couldn't yet stomach the idea of returning to Camp Jaha. Just the thought of it made her blood turn to ice and her breath hard to find.

"If we leave before sunset and walk with the full moon tonight, we could be there before dawn."

"We?"

He turned to look up at her. "If you'd rather stay here—"

"No." she replied in a rush, probably too fast and too forceful. "No, I don't want to stay here. But I don't know how the people of the village will react to seeing me—"

"They will treat you with the respect you deserve." He stated the words as if this fact was absolute and there was no room for anything other option.

"Okay," she replied, because she wasn't sure what else to say to that.

He gave a single nod and then sat back from the fire. "I would like to eat before we set off."

"Right." She fought a small grin as she crouched down and sliced into the fish with all the precision she usually reserved for treating her patients. "Why do you want to go tonight? Wouldn't it be safer and easier to wait until dawn?"

"There are less curious eyes to see us at night."

She waited for him to expand on that, but he fell silent again. An unsettled feeling bloomed within her, bringing a sudden surge of distrust. Did Ashlan have something to hide, was that why he didn't want anyone to see him, was that why he was hiding away here in this crater?

She shook her head as she finished with the first fish and moved on to the second. Ashlan hadn't done anything to earn her suspicions. Her faith in people had been battered after Lexa's betrayal and the revelation that Wallace had been the one behind the destruction of their truce when she'd thought he would help her people escape. She couldn't spend the rest of her life automatically assuming people were up to no good. Though she'd spent weeks with Lexa and the grounders, she still didn't know all that much about their customs. Ashlan wasn't from here, there was every possibility that he'd be viewed as a traitor or trespasser if he was caught wandering around. Wanting to travel under the relative cover of darkness was perfectly reasonable.

They didn't talk much for the rest of the evening as they cooked and ate the fish. Just as the sun started setting, Ashlan got up and went to retrieve the pack he often carried with him, stuffing several items in before slinging it across his shoulders and returning to the fire. He picked up the bucket of water they kept on hand and used it to douse the fire.

"Ready to go?"

She nodded and pushed to her feet. "Do you need me to take anything?"

He hooked his hand into the strap across his shoulder. "Did you bring anything with you that you consider important?"

She sent him an unimpressed look. They both knew she'd walked here with nothing, that she'd all but fled Camp Jaha empty handed and unprepared.

"I have a gun," she replied in a flat voice.

"Then bring your gun if it makes you feel better." He stepped by her, heading for the opposite end of the crater to where they usually climbed out whenever they were going to the river or out hunting.

She exhaled a long breath, the notion that she was leaving the safety of their little camp for the unknown making her heart race faster. It wasn't like she realistically thought she was going to stay in the crater for the rest of her life, but in the last two weeks she also hadn't thought about leaving so soon, even temporarily.

Ashlan didn't set a fast pace, it was more of a stroll as they set off through the darkening forest. Not long after the sun went down, the moon came up, bathing the forest in a bright, blue-white light. With the added glow from the night-blooming plants, it was actually quite a pleasant walk, and she barely noticed the hours slipping by. They stopped several times for brief rests, to eat the rations of dried meat Ashlan had packed, and for water, but Clarke didn't feel tired, despite the fact that she usually spent these hours sleeping.

Just before dawn, the scent of smoke and something cooking came to her on the cool air. As they crested the next rise, the village came into view, nestled in a low valley. Despite the early hour, there already seemed to be some activity going on. As they passed between huts, three men stepped out to intercept them.

" _Komba raun oso_."

Clarke glanced at Ashlan, who simply nodded at the command and then fell into step behind the men. They walked by several more shacks before coming out on a wide open grassed area. To the far end of what seemed to be a town square of sorts, there were several cages with torches burning above them, highlighting the prisoners.

She stopped in disbelief at the sight of the ten or so people sitting and slumped behind the bars, but when their clothing registered and she recognized an achingly familiar profile and mop of dark hair, her heart slammed to a stop against the inside of her chest.

Ashlan had continued several paces ahead, but paused and turned back to her when he realized she wasn't beside him anymore.

"Clarke, is something wrong?" He glanced over his shoulder at their escort, before taking several steps back toward her.

She nodded her chin toward the cages. "Those prisoners, we need to find out what they did wrong."

He hardly spared a glance toward the enclosures. "Why? It has nothing to do with us."

She leaned in, keeping her voice low. "It has everything to do with me. Those prisoners? They're my people, my friends. And I'm not leaving here until whoever locked them up answers to me."


	7. Chapter 7

Clarke crossed her arms, angling herself so she could keep an eye on the cages while a few steps away, Ashlan argued with the group of men who'd escorted them into the village. She couldn't understand everything being said, she'd only picked up a handful of phrases and words during her time with Lexa. For her rudimentary bilingual skills, Ashlan and the others were talking too fast for her to keep up with, especially since she had more than a small portion of her attention on those cages.

After recognizing Bellamy, it hadn't taken her long to also pick out Octavia, Lincoln and Kane in amongst the prisoners. She'd wanted to march right over there and start demanding someone free them, but Ashlan had kept her in place with a hand on her arm, before going over to talk with the grounders. Now they seemed to be having some kind of argument and didn't look like they'd be agreeing on anything in the near future.

Keeping an eye on both Ashlan and the men standing in front of him, she edged across the grass, toward the cages. No one took any notice of her, so once she'd put a good amount of distance between them, she turned and hurried the rest of the way across. When they'd first arrived in the village, it had looked like most of the people inside the two enclosures were sleeping. But the commotion had roused them and as she got closer to the cage, Bellamy got up and came forward, meeting her at the bars.

"Clarke!" He reached an arm through the bars and she caught his hand as she stopped in front of him.

"Bellamy." She was almost breathless from the short dash across the town square, but the lack of oxygen in her lungs could have also had something to do with the way Bellamy was staring at her.

"Where have you been? I was starting to worry about you." He tightened his grip on her, pulling her closer until there was nothing but the bars separating them. She wished more than anything that she could throw her arms around him like she had all those months ago when she'd escaped from the mountain and made it to Camp Jaha. She'd been so careful not to think about him or her friends and family these past weeks, that seeing him now was like waking from some dream, leaving her chest aching as the full weight of reality dropped back onto her.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have left like that, but I needed to get away, I needed—"

"You don't have to explain it to me, Clarke, I understand. I'm just glad you're okay."

A shout sounded behind her, and she glanced over her shoulder to see the grounders had finally noticed she'd sneaked off. Two of them were hurrying across the grass toward her.

She looked back at Bellamy who was staring past her at the approaching grounders with a grim expression on his face.

"Bellamy, I need to know what you did—"

"We didn't do anything. We were trying to negotiate to trade, we'd been to several other villages before this one, but no one wanted to talk with us."

"Then why did they lock you up?" The words were hurried as the guards got closer.

"Its Lexa, she ordered it. They're taking us to Polis this morning."

"Not if I have anything to do with it." She went to step back, holding up her hands before the grounders forcibly removed her. But Bellamy grabbed the hem of her shirt before she got out of arm's reach.

"Clarke, there's a girl named Echo here, she helped me in the mountain. She might help you now if you ask her."

She gave a single nod to let him know she'd caught his low, rushed words before the grounders grabbed her arms and pulled her away from the cage.

"Okay, I'm leaving." She shrugged out of their hold, shooting them a glare as she trudged back toward where Ashlan stood waiting with his arms crossed, looking as equally unimpressed.

"Are you always this impulsive? You couldn't wait one more minute for me to finish speaking with them?"

She returned his glare. "I needed answers and it didn't look like you were getting anywhere with them."

"And rushing over there, putting the villagers on edge, how does that help you free your friends?" His words were almost condescending, but they mostly pissed her off because he was right, damn him.

"What did they think I was going to do, snap the bars with my bare hands? I just wanted to find out what happened. I wasn't trying to make anyone nervous," she replied, trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice.

Ashlan shook his head slightly. "And yet, that's exactly what you did."

Before she could reply, Ashlan turned away as a middle-aged man approached, flanked by a beefy guard on each side.

"Ashlan of the _Floudonkru_ , to what do we owe this visit?" A murmured ripple spread through the grounders surrounding them, and they all took a step back, inclining their heads respectfully at Ashlan.

He pushed his shoulders back, his bearing confident as if this sort of deference was his due. Just who the hell was Ashlan? He hadn't said much about himself beyond the basics, but these grounders all seemed to know him by name alone.

"As you are my father's oldest friend, I didn't realize I needed a reason to visit, Jorge."

Ashlan stepped forward, a friendly smile transforming his features, making him look younger for a moment. Jorge also moved forward, and the two clasped forearms, before embracing.

"And how is your father? I have to admit, I was disappointed he did not attend the summit himself." Jorge said as he stepped back again.

"My father is well, working long days with the _gona_ of our villages from sunrise to sunset."

Jorge grinned. "Then it sounds as if very little has changed. And did Terran come with you?"

Ashlan's expression tightened, and it was almost like the light was extinguished in his eyes. "Terran lies buried in the ruins of Tondc."

Jorge's face became grim. "I am sorry, son. He deserved a proper _floudon_ burial, as did your _strisis_. I heard she wasn't among those who walked out of _Maun-de_."

"My brother and sister have been avenged." Ashlan glanced over at her and she couldn't quite get a read on what he might be thinking from the carefully blank expression, but his gaze momentarily burned into her. "That must be my solace if we can't bury them as they should be."

Jorge glanced over at her, and finally seemed to notice her attire. Though she still had the coat and gloves she'd been wearing the last time she'd stood with Lexa, it was doubtless still clear she wasn't a grounder.

"And your friend?" Jorge's face took on a hard edge, his friendly manner swiftly disappearing.

Ashlan gestured her closer, so she stepped up next to him. "This is _Klark_ of the _Skaikru_."

A swell of exclamations rose up around them, and she shifted a bit closer to Ashlan, resisting the urge to wrap her hand around the gun or small knife Ashlan had given her. She couldn't tell if news of her identity had made the grounders more pissed off, or wary.

Jorge held up both hands, signalling for silence. " _Klark_ , you are welcome in our village, and have our deepest gratitude for defeating an enemy that had taken too many of our people's lives for too many generations."

"I didn't act alone, despite what you might have heard. The people you have locked up over there, they helped me. And it wasn't something I enjoyed doing. I didn't want to kill anyone inside that mountain, but Lexa and Cage left me no choice—"

Ashlan wrapped a hand around her forearm and squeezed gently, cutting off her words as Jorge's bearing tensed, his hard expression indicating he didn't want to hear any of what she had to say.

"This is no doubt a discussion we should have elsewhere," Ashlan said, sounding so calm and diplomatic, it only made her more frustrated. She didn't want to have a discussion, she wanted Bellamy and the rest of her people freed from those cages _right now_.

But as she went to open her mouth to tell Jorge exactly that, Ashlan tightened his grip and shot her a warning glare.

" _Klark_ and I have been walking for most of the night; we could use a warm meal."

Jorge studied her for a long moment, while she clamped her jaw to stop herself from saying anything else. No matter that she usually charged forward doing what she thought was best for the people she cared about, her time with Lexa had taught her that she couldn't assume the grounders thought about things in the same way she did. For now, she would take Ashlan's lead and see where that got her, but in the meantime, she'd try to work out who Echo was and formulate a plan to get her friends out whether Ashlan was willing to help or not.

"Come with me then, there is a fire and fresh meat cooking at my home," Jorge finally said.

Ashlan thanked him, and then let go of her as they started following the leader and his contingent of guards across the town square. Clarke glanced over her shoulder, able to see the cages more clearly now that the sun had started to come up. Bellamy and Octavia were sitting side by side, watching her, their expressions grim, but even from here she could see the hope and expectation in their eyes. She tore her gaze away, stomach clenching as a small swell of panic clamped down on her.

They shouldn't look to her, shouldn't rely on her. She'd only proven time and time again that when people relied on her, they got killed. She didn't want the responsibility, she hadn't set out to lead anyone, she'd only been trying to keep everyone alive and for the most part safe, that's all she'd wanted since they'd come to the ground.

The dark, hollow sensation she'd been pushing down the past two weeks rose within her again, reminding her of why she'd walked away from Camp Jaha in the first place. A small part of her simply wanted to turn right around and escape back to the undemanding safety of Tondc. But she'd never do that, not when her people were in that cage, especially Bellamy. Not when she knew they were being sent to Polis. After Lexa's betrayal, she couldn't even begin to guess what the _heda_ had in mind for her people, and honestly didn't want to know. Unfortunately, she would probably have to face Lexa eventually. And somehow she had to make sure that the rest of the people from the ark didn't bear the brunt of whatever feelings or animosity Lexa might have toward her from the way things had ended.

 


	8. Chapter 8

 

 

 

Clarke followed Ashlan into Jorge's home. It wasn't any larger than most of the others in the village, and inside she found a simple design of one main sitting and kitchen area, plus two smaller rooms off the far side that appeared to be bedrooms.

A girl maybe a year or two older than herself sat at a sturdy wooden table slicing cheese and bread, and as Jorge had promised, there was meat cooking on the fire. The girl glanced up as they entered, her gaze passing over Jorge to stop on Ashlan.

"You remember my daughter, Echo?" Jorge indicated toward the girl as he crossed the small room.

Ashlan nodded with a reserved smile. "I heard she was among those in the mountain, I'm glad she came home to you."

This was Echo? She pushed the food forward and then stood, her bearing as through she expected a fight, not a meal. However, Ashlan didn't seem worried, he moved forward to sit on the opposite side of the table, reaching over to help himself to a slice of bread.

"Last time I saw you, Echo, you were all skinny legs and arms, easily half my height."

She folded her arms across her chest. "Yet I still managed to put you down and take the stick you'd been chasing me with."

Ashlan's expression became more relaxed, almost teasing. "I remember nothing."

Echo muttered something in grounder that made her father laugh and Ashlan grin. Jorge slapped Ashlan heartily on the back and then took the meat from the fire, setting it down on the table.

Feeling like she was intruding on a family dinner, Clarke hung back until Ashlan glanced over his shoulder at her, indicating with a nod of his head that she should join them.

She sighed low and went over to sit next to him. She didn't want to eat, she wanted someone to go out and free her friends. Unfortunately, she knew the grounders too well by now; they wouldn't release Bellamy and the others if the orders for their capture had come from Lexa. The muscles in her shoulders tensed as her last encounter with the commander ran through her mind. What could Lexa want with them? Why couldn't they all just live in peace without all the backstabbing and trying to kill each other? She wasn't ready to be forced back into the politics and scheming—she hadn't even wanted that in the first place. All she'd wanted was a safe place for their people to begin a new life on the ground where they weren't confined by ship walls, forced to live by dictates that limited their population while ensuring their survival. She'd just wanted a new beginning, free of all that had weighed her down in the past. Instead, all she'd found was more weights being strung around her neck.

" _Choj op_." Ashlan pushed a plate of food in front of her, breaking her out of the dark thoughts.

She glanced at him, about to tell him she wasn't hungry, but noticed Echo and Jorge watching her closely. Fine. She'd play nice and join in their meal. Maybe it would win her some brownie points when she asked them to free her friends after.

The meal went by with small snatches of conversation here and there, a mixture of English and grounder. They mostly talked of people and places she had no reference for, making her wonder just how much was beyond the forest and mountain they'd seen since landing in the dropship.

At last, everyone seemed to be finished, and she tried not to seem too eager as they stepped outside again.

"I'm glad you came to see us, Ashlan." Jorge said. "When do you return to the _Floudonkru_?"

"I'm not sure, there are things keeping me here for the time being."

Jorge nodded and extended a hand for a firm handshake. "Then as long as you're nearby, consider my home your home."

Ashlan inclined his head. "Thank you, that's very generous."

Jorge returned the gesture. "And now if you'll excuse us, we have business to take care of. The prisoners need to be sent—"

"About that." Clarke stepped forward, not able to keep her mouth shut and play polite any longer. "They didn't do anything that deserved the punishment of being locked in cages. I want you to free them."

Jorge sent her a chiding look, as though she was a two year old who'd spilled a glass of milk. "The _heda_ ordered it. That is reason enough."

"I don't care what Lexa ordered, she has no say over my people. You need to let them go before this gets more complicated than it already is."

Jorge crossed his arms, not looking so entertained any longer. "If you have a problem with it, then you can go with them and take it up with her. But I am not letting them go, they will be sent to Polis today."

She stared at him for a long moment, but didn't see the slightest waver in his hard expression. No matter what she said, she wouldn't be able to convince him to simply let them go. Okay, plan B. She'd just have to go with them and try to find an opportunity to free them before they reached Polis. If only she could get a message to the ark, maybe get some reinforcements. But she'd work that out later. For now, she'd play along until they got out of the village and there weren't so many grounders around any more.

"Fine, have it your way." She turned her back on him and strode away, not caring if it was considered rude or she'd just broken some grounder protocol. However, she hadn't gone far when Ashlan caught up with her.

"Where are you going?"

They emerged on the town square and started across the grass. The grounders were already getting her friends out of the cages, binding their wrists and then connecting them all together with a longer rope. Well, that was going to make thing difficult when it came to freeing them.

"I'm going with them to Polis." She stopped and turned to face him. "Thank you, Ashlan, for everything you've done for me in the past few weeks, I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't been in the ruins of Tondc when I got there."

His lips lifted in a half-grin; the smile he usually got when he was making a joke at her expense. "You definitely would have starved to death."

"I wasn't totally hopeless, I did find some berries."

"Then you might have lasted an extra few days."

She let a small smile slip free, but it didn't last long. She was actually going to miss him. Ever since she'd lost Wells, she hadn't found anyone she could sit and talk to for hours on end about nothing important, someone who didn't expect anything of her or want something from her. Ashlan had actually become a really good friend and she hadn't even notice it happening.

"Seriously, I mean it. Thank you, I won't forget."

He nodded, his smile becoming speculative. "Is this your way of telling me goodbye, Clarke?"

"Well, it doesn't have to be goodbye for good. I hope its not."

He crossed his arms. "I'm not letting you go to Polis without me, Clarke."

She stepped closer to him. "Ashlan, you don't want to get involved with this. Things between me and Lexa— its complicated and messy. I don't even know what's waiting for me in Polis. She might welcome me, or she might order me killed on sight. After everything you've done, after I cost you your brother's life, I refuse to be responsible—"

He reached up and closed a hand over her shoulder. "You're not responsible Terran's death, Clarke. And you're definitely not responsible for me, or my actions, just as I am not responsible for yours. But I have come to like you in these past weeks. And no matter how capable and brave you are, everyone can use some backup every now and then. Let me help you, I might be able to smooth the way with any other grounders we come across."

She studied his determined expression, the stubborn set to his mouth and the resolute gleam in his green eyes. She'd be foolish to refuse the assistance if he was willing, but the acceptance of his help sat like a stone in her stomach. She didn't want Ashlan's name on the long list of dead she carried with her.

She nodded, not able to voice the words. He gave her shoulder a quick squeeze, and then set off, heading for where the grounders of the village were preparing several horses to set off. Echo joined them, now wearing a thick fur coat and a sword though her belt. She gave a few orders, seeming to have command over the large men surrounding her. As she walked over to join the party, Ashlan approached Echo and had a short conversation with her. Echo glanced over at her, the expression on her face far from friendly. And this was the girl Bellamy thought would help them escape?

After a moment, Ashlan returned to her side. "Echo has agreed to let us accompany them on the condition we don't talk to the prisoners."

She crossed her arms and shot a glare at the girl, though she wasn't looking as she mounted a horse at the head of the line.

"She can't stop me from talking to my own people."

Ashlan's expression took on an edge of impatience. "Just for now, please cooperate and we'll work something out. If you go against her orders and make her angry, she'll only become harder to deal with."

She huffed a sigh, looking over at where Bellamy stood between Kane and Octavia on the rope line. He was shooting her a questioning look, but she shook her head slightly to let him know she hadn't gotten anywhere yet.

His face tensed, frustration in the line of his mouth as he pressed his lips together and glanced at Ashlan, before he turned away from them.

"Fine," she muttered. "I won't try anything for now. But I'm not going to sit back and let Echo lead us all the way to Polis and whatever Lexa wants."

As the party started moving off, she fell into step just off to the side, near enough to keep any eye on Bellamy and the others, but not so close that anyone could accuse her of trying to communicate with them.

Somehow, in the next few hours, she had to find another opportunity to talk with Bellamy and come up with a way to free them before they reached Polis. She didn't even want to consider that they might have to escape from within the grounder's capital city. Ashlan fell into step beside her as they left the village, his presence reassuring. At least she wasn't alone in this.

 


	9. Chapter 9

Bellamy twisted his wrists against the rough rope binding his hands, only managing to make them tighter and chafe more. The grounders hadn't left much slack between each of them in the long rope tethering them all together, and with his longer stride, he was having to adjust his steps not to accidentally kick Kane walking in front of him. Although, considering this situation was half his fault, the ex-chancellor probably deserved it.

He glanced over his shoulder and paused for half a step, bringing Octavia closer to him. "Why didn't you tell me the grounders had warned us not to continue on?"

She shrugged one shoulder, her arms relaxed in front of her and not seeming as concerned about being bound as he was. "I knew it wouldn't make a difference to you. You weren't out here for trade alliances, you were out here looking for Clarke. You wouldn't have wanted to stop."

Damn it, she was right. But it would have at least been nice to have a heads up.

"So, are you happy now that you've found her?" Octavia glared sideways to where Clarke was walking with the grounders a little way off from them.

"Actually, yeah, I am." As he focused on Clarke, some of the tightness in his chest loosened. The sun glinted off the golden tangle of her hair, and almost as though she'd felt the weight of his regard, she looked over at him. His heart thumped an uneven rhythm against the inside of his ribs as she stared at him for a long moment, before the grounder she was walking next to said something and she glanced away again.

Hell, he'd missed her in the last couple of weeks. He hadn't even realized how much until he'd seen her early this morning. It was like he'd been walking around with this pit in his stomach and hadn't noticed how much it was pinching until it had stopped. Whatever happened from here, he couldn't let Clarke go off on her own again, not unless he at least knew where she was going so he could find her if he needed to.

In the last few weeks, he'd been handling things because that was what people expected of him—to get on with things and act like helping kill over five hundred people hadn't been a big deal. And maybe because he'd had various tasks to distract him and spent more than half his time wondering where Clarke had gone, he'd been able to not think about everything that had happened in the mountain. But at the same time, it was like a pressure was rising up inside him, making his temper shorter and a quiet kind of desperation build. Eventually it was going to blow and part of him was terrified of how and when that would happen.

But finding Clarke had eased all that a little. Whatever was going on inside him had to be the same for her. They didn't need to talk about it, just seeing her, seeing that she was okay made him believe that maybe in the end, he'd be okay too—not snap and go postal, deciding to take himself and anyone else within blast radius to hell or some crazy thing.

"We're coming up on an hour," Octavia said in a low voice, glancing back at Lincoln, who gave a subtle nod.

Bellamy shook his head, shooting O's boyfriend a hard look. "Don't do anything yet; just wait until we can talk to Clarke."

Octavia's glare deepened. "I don't know if I trust Clarke any longer, and maybe you shouldn't either. In case you haven't noticed, she's walking around free helping the grounders escort us to Polis. And she's barely looked at us since we set out, let alone tried to talk to us about escaping."

"I'm sure she's got her reasons." Impatience hardened his tone, but didn't seem to make a lick of difference to Octavia. Why was his sister so ready to believe the worst in Clarke? Before the whole mess of an alliance with Lexa, he'd thought Clarke and O were finally starting to get along.

"Yeah, well I don't want to bet my life on that," his sister muttered.

"Octavia."

She rolled her eyes at what she probably thought was his brotherly-nagging tone. But he didn't care. He trusted Clarke with his life, whatever her reason for hanging back, he believed she was doing what she thought was best for all of them.

"Okay," Octavia conceded. "We'll give it some time. But if Clarke doesn't act soon, then I will. And I don't care who gets caught in the crossfire."

She shot him one last glare before stepping back from him, moving closer to Lincoln. He sighed, leaving as much distance between them as the rope would allow. He could still hear her talking quietly to Lincoln, probably filling him in on their conversation.

With nothing else to do, he kept most of his attention on Clarke, trying to figure out what was going on with her. It was weird that the grounders hadn't tied her up with the rest of them. She also seemed more than a little familiar with that one grounder she'd been walking next to all morning, the guy about his own age with a tattoo on his neck and jaw.

It seemed unlikely, but had she been hanging out with the grounders, staying in that village for the last few weeks? But then couldn't she have done something about their imprisonment sooner if that was the case? There was no use speculating, these questions couldn't be answered by anyone except Clarke herself.

Around mid-morning, the horses at the head of the party stopped by the river. A few of the grounders went to have a drink and fill up their canteens, but no one offered them any water. Kane sat down on a grassy bank next to the path they'd been following, pulling the rope between them a little tighter.

Clarke had stopped next to that same grounder, but she was closer now than she'd been all morning. He took half a step forward, until the rope connecting him to Octavia and Kane stopped him from going any further.

"Clarke."

She glanced over at him, but didn't answer, simply shook her head. What the hell did that even mean? One of the grounders nearby told him to shut up, but he didn't care. He wasn't going to stroll along any longer and pretend like Clarke wasn't even there.

"Clarke!"

The grounder next to him stepped in and swung a fist at him. With his hands bound, he had no way of defending himself. He took the hit square in the face, knocking him back on his ass and making his head spin.

"Hey!" Clarke rushed over, shoving the grounder who'd hit him out of the way as she knelt down in front of him. So apparently he only needed to get punched in the face to get her attention.

"Are you okay?" She reached up and touched his chin, her fingers gentle.

He worked his aching jaw back and forth, before wiping the back of his hand across the trickle of blood from his split lip.

"I'm seeing two of you, but I figure that's a good thing," he answered.

She sent him an exasperated look, shifting her fingers in a stroke along his jaw line to just below his ear. "I'm serious. Does your jaw hurt anywhere? You took a pretty hard hit."

He reached up and caught her hand in his. "I'm fine, Clarke, really."

"I ordered you not to speak with the prisoners if you were going to accompany us."

Bellamy glanced past Clarke's shoulder to see Echo standing behind her, expression aggravated and one hand resting on the hilt of her sword in her belt.

Clarke pushed up, before turning to glare at Echo. Kane and Octavia stepped in, helping him up. The sudden movement made everything around him tilt for a long, unsettling second, before his eyes got with the program and managed to focus straight again.

"And I haven't tried to talk with any of them. But since one of your men decided to attack someone who was unarmed and tied up, I figured all bets were off."

Echo crossed her arms. "The order stands. If you cannot follow it—"

The grounder Clarke had been walking with all morning stepped in. "Echo, Clarke is a healer, it is in her nature to make sure others are well. You can't hold that against her. She was just checking to make sure he was uninjured. I assume Lexa wants these people delivered to her unharmed?"

For a moment, Echo simply stared at him with a cold expression. "Careful where you tread, Ashlan. You wouldn't want others to start questioning your loyalty."

Ashlan's expression hardened. "Heed your own advice, Echo, and don't overstep where your influence extends."

The pair glared at each other for another long second, before Echo turned away, giving the order for them to continue on.

Clarke shot a grateful smile at Ashlan, and the expression made something inside Bellamy pinch. But then she turned to look at him, and he forced the momentary discomfort away.

"Ashlan says its two days walk to Polis," Clarke said as the grounders around them started re-mounting their horses and getting ready to move on. "We've got time to figure something out, and I will. Just don't get impatient."

Clarke shot a warning look at Octavia, as if she knew his sister was the one who needed convincing the most.

"We'll wait," he replied, pretending he couldn't see the way Octavia was glaring at him. No matter how much Octavia might want to fight her way free, he had to believe that Clarke would be able to come up with a better solution, one that wouldn't risk half of them getting killed.

As they set off once more, Clarke sent him one last reassuring smile, before putting some distance between them again, returning to walk next to Ashlan, whoever the hell he was to her. The pair of them had definitely gotten to know one another quite well. And he didn't want to consider why that notion was like an ember burning into his skin.

At the head of the line, Echo urged her horse into a walk, glancing back at him, her expression blank, as though he was a total stranger to her. She'd given Clarke the order not to talk to him, and instead of trying to help them escape, she was leading them to Lexa and whatever she had in store for them in Polis.

Frustration simmered within him as Echo turned away again. He was starting to wish he'd left her locked up in the mountain. So much for doing each other any favors. Whatever. Echo and Lexa could go to hell. The only things that mattered right now were finding a way to get free, and not letting Clarke go off anywhere without him again.


	10. Chapter 10

 

 

 

The sun was starting to touch the top of the mountains in the distance when Echo finally called a stop for the day. Clarke hung back, crossing her arms and watching as the two ends of the rope binding all her friends together were tied between trees, before the grounders started setting up camp for the night.

Despite Echo's mandate that she couldn't speak to the prisoners, she was about ready to take her chances on whatever punishment the girl might inflict, because no one had bothered making sure any of them had any food or water all day. She thought at least two in the line were displaying early signs of dehydration, so she was giving it another half an hour and if none of the grounders had done anything about it, then she was going to take matters into her own hands, no matter what Echo had to say on the matter.

Ashlan stepped up next to her, offering a canteen, and making her feel even worse for her friends. She didn't take it, instead, she nodded toward where Bellamy and the others had sat down, clearly worn down from the long hike, made harder by the fact they were all tied so closely together.

"What about them? They haven't had anything to drink all day. If Echo keeps this up, half of them won't even make it to Polis."

Ashlan cast a concerned look in the direction of her friends. "I know, and it's an issue I intend to fix shortly, but first, there's something I need to show you."

He reached down and took her wrist in a gentle hold, tugging slightly. She glanced over at Bellamy to see him watching her closely. A bruise had formed around the right side of his mouth over the day, and his expression was sombre as he stared at her. As she turned away, it was like she could feel the weight of his disappointment sitting on her shoulders. Not to mention the growing hostility she was sensing from Octavia. She'd told them to be patient, that she'd find a way to get them out of this situation, but she'd been forming and discarding ideas in her mind all day and hadn't come up with a feasible plan, leaving her with nothing but a headache.

She followed Ashlan into the forest, away from the organized commotion of the grounders setting up camp. The noise faded behind them, and she took in a deeper breath of earth-scented air, some of the tension that'd been building up within her all day draining away now that it was just the two of them again.

They walked in silence for a while, but she couldn't enjoy the simplicity of it as she had in the past two weeks, knowing that Bellamy and the others were hungry, thirsty, and still tied up. She glanced around, realizing that some of the surrounding forest looked kind of familiar, like they were back-tracking or something.

"Where are we going?" she asked as she spotted the path they'd been walking along just now.

"I noticed something useful a little while back. Just up here." He quickened his steps, vaulting a log and then stropping in front of a tangled, thorny bush dotted with dark berries, but not the kind anyone would want to eat unless they enjoyed throwing up a lot.

"It's an ink-berry bush. But they make you sick." She crossed her arms and glanced over her shoulder. If she started walking back now, around half an hour would have passed, and if Echo hadn't seen to getting the others some water—

"The berries are poisonous, yes," Ashlan replied, interrupting her thoughts. He pulled his knife from his belt and knelt down. "But the root, when boiled in water, creates a kind of tisane people have used for generations that sends a person into a deep sleep for a few hours."

He dug into the soft earth with his knife and then pulled up, exposing the thick roots of the plant.

It took her tired, over-stressed mind a long minute to connect the dots, but when she did, she couldn't help but grin. "You want to spike their drinks, send them all to sleep so we can free my people and get a head start on escaping."

"I would never suggest such a thing," Ashlan replied with a wicked glint in his green eyes that told her it was exactly what he'd been thinking. "You're a healer, I was just sharing the usefulness of ink-berry root for your future reference."

She knelt down next to him, pushing some more dirt out of the way. "How much do we need to put that many grounders to bed?"

He yanked a handful of roots out and shook the dirt free. "Around four times this much. We'll start here and see how we go, but we might need to find a second bush."

"Let's do it, the sooner we get it done, the sooner I can free my friends."

Ashlan sent her a short grin. "So I need to add bossy to impatient and impulsive."

"I'm not bossy." She put on a faintly indignant tone, though she was now feeling lighter and more relieved than she had all day. "I just know what needs to be done and see it through."

He gave her a look that said he wasn't buying it, before turning his attention to digging up more roots. They worked quickly, racing against the fading sun. By the time they had a decent pile of the medicinal plant, the sun had almost completely set.

They brushed off as much of the dirt as possible, and Ashlan had just started stuffing the root into his pack when movement beyond the nearby trees made Clarke freeze. She slowly pulled out the small knife she always carried now as she rose to her feet.

Echo stepped out from behind the trees, expression cool, one hand on the hilt of her sword.

"Ink-berry root? Having trouble sleeping, Ashlan?" She took a few steps closer and then stopped, bracing a foot against the log they'd crossed earlier. "Seems like a lot for one person."

Clarke glanced at Ashlan as he calmly finished stuffing the root into his pack and then stood, slinging the bag across his shoulder.

"What do you want, Echo?" He didn't sound concerned about the fact they'd just been discovered by the leader of their little prison-transport-party. In fact, he sounded almost bored.

"What do I want?" She repeated, her voice going up a notch. "I wanted to be able to spill the blood of those who wronged me, but apparently that's already been taken care of."

Echo sent her a glare with enough venom to kill her on the spot. So Echo hated her because why? She'd stolen her revenge or something? She would have been glad to let the girl have it.

"I want to follow in my father's footsteps and lead the _gonakru_ without them whispering like mewling _goufa_ that I am _kwelen_ since I came out of the _maun_. I want to deliver all those _skaikru_ to the _heda_ as my father demanded to earn some respect." Echo stepped over the log, walking over to stand in front of Ashlan. "I want for you to return to the _floudonkru_ and stay out of matters that don't concern you."

"And these matters _do_ concern you?" Ashlan crossed his arms, still not looking anything but uninterested. "I seem to remember you had other plans for life, ones that didn't involve the ambitions of your father."

Echo's expression became even more resentful. "That naïve girl was taken into Maun-de and didn't come out again."

"Bellamy told me." She hadn't realized she was going to say anything until the words had slipped out and then both Ashlan and Echo were staring at her. "Bellamy told me that you helped each other in the mountain. He hoped you would help him again now."

Echo glanced away, but not before Clarke saw something flash in the other girl's eyes. Remorse? Guilt? Whatever it was, she was trying to hide it.

"Things were different in the mountain; we both did what we had to in order to get out alive. After he survived the draining and fought that guard, I respected the warrior in him—"

"What do you mean _after the draining_?" She'd stepped forward and grabbed Echo's arm, but the other girl shook off her grip with an aggravated glare.

"They brought him in like any other; stripped and decontaminated. He ended up in the cage next to me, and when the _veida_ came to choose one of us for harvest, he demanded they take him instead of me. They strung him up and drained him, just as I'd seen them do to countless others, but he didn't die. After they took him down, he fought and then promised to come back for me."

Clarke sucked in a sharp breath, pressing a hand to her middle as she spun away from Echo, he stomach churning. What they'd done to Bellamy— _oh god_. And he'd never said a word. She dropped to her knees, breathing desperately against the panic, the urge to be sick at the images bombarding her mind of the grounders she'd seen hung upside down and drained. They'd done that to _Bellamy_. For a split second, just a brief, hot, satisfying moment, she was glad she'd killed them all. Wished she could go back and put a bullet in Cage herself. But then her stomach heaved again, and the guilt returned, doubling and sharpening. She'd sent Bellamy into that mountain and he'd been tortured. How was she supposed to live with that on top of everything else?

"Clarke?" Ashlan set a gentle hand on her shoulder, pulling her back slightly. "Are you all right?"

She leaned into him, letting him take her weight for a moment as she gathered her strength. _No more_. She wasn't going to play Echo's game any longer. Her friends were going to walk free from those ropes and they definitely weren't going to Polis.

"I'm okay." She wiped a hand across her mouth, even though she hadn't actually been sick, before letting Ashlan help her up. Once she was on her feet, she stepped away from him and turned to face Echo, who was staring at her with detached impatience.

"This ends now."

Echo scoffed. "You may have killed everyone in that mountain, but you don't scare me, _gada_."

"You don't need to fear me, Echo. I don't want to kill you; I never set out to kill anyone. But when people get in between me and my friends, that's when death comes. Ashlan and I could have picked the berries; you and your men could have thrown up until you died. But we dug up the root, and so long as you don't get in my way, the worst you'll have to deal with is a nice long nap."

Echo drew her sword. "I could slit your throat now and solve all my problems."

Ashlan stepped in, pushing Echo's sword aside. "And then you'll have me as an enemy, and we both know that's not something you or your father wants."

Echo's expression darkened and she lowered the sword.

"Besides," Clarke moved in until she was less than a step away from the other girl. "The alliance may have ended, but Lexa and I spent a lot of time getting to know one another, we actually had a lot in common. How do you think she would take the news that you were responsible for my death?"

Echo stepped back from her, jamming the sword back into her belt with a thwarted glare. "Don't mistake this for bravery, Clarke. You're a fool, especially if you think Lexa cares about you."

Echo turned away, vaulting the log and stalking back toward the path, quickly disappearing into the lengthening shadows.

"What do you think she'll do now?" She turned to look up at Ashlan, who had a troubled crease to his brow.

"Hopefully keep quiet and stay out of our way." He glanced down at her. "Don't worry, I'll watch her closely, and I can take care of it if she causes any more trouble."

She nodded, and looked away, not wanting to know how Ashlan would _take care of it_.

Ashlan set a hand in the middle of her back and urged her into a walk. "Come on, we've got a lot of tea to brew."

 


	11. Chapter 11

 

 

 

It was just on dark by the time the grounders finished setting up camp and one of them finally decided to bring over some water, sending a bucket with a fist-sized cup along the line.

Bellamy took a turn after Kane, drinking far less than he would have liked. A few other in their group probably needed it more than he did. He didn't know much about dehydration like Clarke did, but a couple toward the end of the rope line had definitely been looking unsteady by the time they'd stopped for the day.

He passed the water on to Octavia, before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, glancing toward the spot in the forest where Clarke had disappeared with Ashlan a while ago. He hoped they were off organizing some kind of plan to set them free… not doing anything else. Things that made him uncomfortable and sparked a surge of resentment if he thought about it too closely.

"Clarke certainly seems friendly with the grounders. I suppose after everything with Lexa, they respect her."

Bellamy turned to look at Kane, his expression casual, but there was always a calculating gleam in the man's eye. He didn't do or say anything without a second agenda.

"What's that supposed to mean?" He leaned back against the tree stump behind them, resisting the urge to pull at the ropes that had rubbed his wrists raw.

"It doesn't mean anything. I was just making an observation."

Yeah right, and he was the next chancellor of the ark. "You've been awfully quiet today. I would have thought you'd have an opinion on how we're meant to get out of this mess."

Kane shrugged one shoulder. "Making a commotion and fighting won't get us anywhere. We're outnumbered two-to-one and they've got us all tied together. It would be a waste of energy."

"Anyone would think you wanted to go to Polis and see the bitch commander."

Kane didn't answer, but his silence spoke loud and clear.

"That's it, isn't it?" He lowered his voice, leaning closer to Kane so Octavia wouldn't overhear him. "You want to go to Polis. Are you nuts? Do you know what Lexa might do to us?"

"Lexa has no reason to hurt us. I'd like to know what she proposes to do with us. Winter is coming, Bellamy, and we don't have anywhere near the resources to survive it. We're short on everything; food, blankets, even dry wood for fires. And depending on how cold it gets, the ark is going to end up being one giant refrigerator. At this point, we can't help ourselves, so we need to rely on the good will of others."

Bellamy scoffed. "Good will of the grounders? Have you met them?"

Kane didn't seem fazed by his arguments. "They agreed to a truce with us once before, perhaps we can find common ground to stand on again."

"That was when they thought we were useful to them. And look how that turned out. Whatever Lexa has decided about us, I'm guessing its something along the lines of ordering us off her land, before they take matters into their own hands and force us to leave. That's what they tried before when they attacked the dropship camp. There's no reason why they won't try again."

Kane shot him a smile that was almost chiding. "I choose to believe we can work something out before it comes to that."

Bellamy shook his head and glanced away to stop himself saying anything else. It was no use, Kane wasn't listening. After everything, he'd thought the people who'd come down on the ark had realized what they were dealing with when it came to the grounders, but Kane still seemed set on believing they could forge some kind of magical treaty and they'd all just suddenly start getting along.

Movement in the dark forest caught his attention, and he looked up to see Clarke and Ashlan returning. The water had nearly reached the end of the line, and Clarke stopped to talk to a couple of people, even though she wasn't meant to. After a moment, she continued on, but seemed to be avoiding his gaze as she followed Ashlan over to where he'd started building a fire a little way off from the other grounders.

He sighed, and let his head fall back against the stump, looking up at the stars splashed across the night sky. Even though it had only been a few months, now that he was on the ground, it was hard to believe he'd spent his entire life up there. He only wished his mom had lived to see it. She would have been so proud of the woman Octavia was becoming.

Despite the fact that he was tied up and sitting upright, he must have dozed—not surprising considering his lack of sleep the past few nights, even before they were captured, and the long walk during the day. He came around to Octavia elbowing him in the side, and he flinched when she caught a vulnerable spot between two ribs.

" _Ow_." He glared at her, before using his forearm to deflect the next nudge. "What is it?"

"Look." She nodded at where a majority of the grounders had set themselves up for the evening around a large fire. He must have been out of it for a while, it looked like half of them had fallen asleep. But he didn't get what Octavia was trying to show him.

"What? I don't see anything."

"Just watch."

He sent her an annoyed sideways glare before looking back at the campfire. As he watched, a couple more grounders nodded off to sleep. Like, one second they were eating or talking, and the next they were out of it. Those remaining awake must have realized something was up, shaking their companions, but it wasn't long before they dropped like stones, until the camp was silent and still.

"What the hell?" he muttered under his breath. It was actually a little bit spooky.

Clarke and Ashlan got up from where they'd been sitting by their own fire. Ashlan stopped to check on a few grounds, while Clarke went to the end of the rope line and started cutting people free.

And then it hit him. This was it, this was Clarke's escape plan. He elbowed Octavia like she'd done to him a minute ago.

"I told you Clarke would think of something."

"Yeah, yeah." she muttered, not seeming the least bit impressed. "But she couldn't do it six hours ago and save us half a day's walk?"

One of the free ark soldiers came over to cut their ropes, and Bellamy pushed to his feet, before holding a hand out for Kane. Once he was upright, he searched the small group and found Clarke checking on one of the people who'd seemed unsteady earlier.

He walked over, waiting a few steps away while she got the guy to drink some extra water. When she was done, she helped the man up, and he sent her a grateful smile before going to join the others. She turned, and looked surprised to see him standing there.

For half a second he thought about grabbing her up in his arms and hugging her against his chest, but she looked away from him and started to step away.

"We've got to get moving, I don't know how long they'll sleep for."

"So this _was_ your doing." He trailed after her as she went to the fire she'd been sitting near and picked up a pack.

"Actually, it was Ashlan's idea, you can thank him."

Annoyance flitted through him for a second. _Ashlan again_. What was he, like some sort of grounder superhero?

"Okay, then, I'm guessing the plan now is to put as much distance between us and them as we can?"

"Something like that." Clarke still wouldn't quite meet his eyes as she doused the fire and then brushed past him again, heading toward where Ashlan stood talking to Kane. Now what was up with her? He knew she was still struggling with what had happened in the mountain, but shutting him out wouldn't help either of them.

Octavia and Lincoln had retrieved their packs from the cart the grounders had stored them in, handing them around quickly. One of the soldiers got on the radio and tried to contact the ark, but they'd walked out of range.

Just as they were getting ready to leave, Echo stepped out of the shadows, right into his path. Apparently she hadn't been affected by whatever had sent her men to sleep. His heart skipped a beat, and he closed his hand around the grip of his newly returned rifle.

"Echo," he sent her a stiff nod, not really sure what he was meant to say to the person they were trying to escape from.

She passed a quick look over the group as Clarke, Octavia and Lincoln came to stand with him.

"Don't try to follow us," Clarke said, her voice cold.

Echo crossed her arms, glaring at Clarke. "If I don't find you, someone else will. Lexa has demanded your presence in Polis and only a fool would ignore her."

"If Lexa wants to talk to us, she knows where we are. Why don't you finish the journey to Polis and tell her that yourself?" With one last glare, Clarke turned her back on Echo and strode away.

"Come on, Bel." Octavia backed up a few steps, before she and Lincoln followed Clarke to where the group had started heading into the forest.

"I had hoped we might be friends." He didn't know why he said the words since Echo had more than proven what had happened in the mountain meant nothing to her.

"When you killed three hundred of my people with your exploding fire, someone I cared very much for was killed. I can never be friends with those who murdered my people, no matter what alliance the _heda_ makes on our behalf."

"Then I'm sorry." The apology sounded empty, because they both knew there was no changing things that had already happened. "What you did for me in the mountain, I won't ever forget that. But like Clarke said, don't try to follow us."

He turned away from her emotionless expression, jogging into the darker forest to catch up with the rest of the group, his soul heavy. There'd been so much death between their people, too much bad blood for them to ever live in peace. Kane might believe that whatever Lexa had in mind for them wouldn't be all bad, but in his experience, anything to do with the grounders only ended in pain, suffering, or death.

 


	12. Chapter 12

"We should think about stopping." Clarke glanced over her shoulder, straining her eyes against the darkness to make out all the people in their group. A couple were lagging behind again, their shadowy forms farther back from the rest. After they'd escaped Echo and her men, they'd kept up a hurried pace for a while, but they'd been steadily slowing down as the night had worn on, and they hadn't put as much distance between themselves and the sleeping grounders as she would have liked.

"I think you're right," Ashlan agreed. "But not here. Up ahead, there's ruins of an old building we can shelter in."

Around another half an hour went by, before the half-collapsed, grown-over bricked remains of what had probably been some kind of factory came into view. As they changed directions and headed for the structure, Bellamy caught up with her, his shoulder brushing hers as he stepped closer.

"What are we doing here?" he asked, gun in front of him as he scanned the area.

"Stopping for the rest of the night," she replied trying to subtly put some distance between them with her next step.

"We can't stop," Octavia interrupted from right behind her. "We need to put a lot more ground between us and Echo's men, who by the way, are going to be pissed when they wake up and realized what happened."

"You're right, it'd probably be better if we walked until dawn," she agreed, working to keep her voice even. She was tired, both physically and emotionally. The last thing she wanted to do was butt heads with Octavia. "But there's at least two in the group who won't be able to keep going much longer."

Octavia came around to walk on her opposite side to Bellamy. "If we stop and the grounders catch up with us—"

Clarke stopped, frustration simmering up within her as she turned to Octavia.

"Are you going to make them walk until they can't walk anymore, Octavia? And then what, leave them behind?"

"If they can't keep up—"

"Octavia." Bellamy's voice held a note of warning.

His sister turned her glare on him. "Of course you're taking Clarke's side."

Before either of them could say anything, Octavia stalked away, following where Ashlan had led the others around the far side of a wall.

Bellamy stared after her with an annoyed expression. "Sorry about Octavia. I think the whole thing with Indra has been hard on her—"

"You don't need to apologize for her." She turned away from Bellamy without looking directly at him. Great, now she felt that stinging burn of guilt when she was around _both_ Blake siblings; Octavia because she hadn't warned her about the missile at Tondc, and Bellamy because he'd gone inside the mountain only to be tortured.

"Clarke—"

She quickened her pace, not wanting to deal with Bellamy or the tempest of conflicting feelings she had for him right now.

When she rounded the wall, she found the others settling in the shelter of where a few rusted steel beams were sticking out of the bricks. Ashlan, Kane, and two others were putting tarps up over the beams, while a couple more started organizing a fire.

As Ashlan looked up at her, she nodded her head to the side and then stepped away from the others setting up camp.

Ashlan hurried over to her and grabbed her arm, stopping her from going any farther. "You need to be careful around here, Clarke, the ground is unstable."

She looked down, but couldn't see anything besides leaf litter and other forest debris. Crossing her arms, she turned to face him.

"What are we going to do if Echo and her men come after us?"

"Hopefully she won't, but if she does, they probably won't come in here."

She glanced around, a trickle of foreboding creeping through her, but she couldn't see much besides dark shadows. "Why not?"

"Like I said, the ground is unstable in this area, which is why I've told everyone not to wander away on their own. I only know of a few safe paths in and out, where you can walk without the ground collapsing beneath you."

She sent him a speculative frown. "And how is it you even know that when you're not from around here?"

He sent her a grin, the one he usually used when he was avoiding her questions. "I find knowing useful things tends to help keep a person alive."

"Right." Just as she'd suspected, he'd answered without answering.

"Come on, we've got two hours until dawn. I'm going to do a bit of backtracking and catch us some breakfast."

She walked next to him as they returned to the camp, and then shot him a smile as he went to leave the way they'd come in.

"Be careful," she called after him. He waved to her before disappearing around the far end of the wall.

"Where's he going?"

She almost had a heart attack at Bellamy's voice right behind her.

"He's going to catch something for us to eat," she said as she turned around, looking past him to see the tarps up and people settled beneath them, while the fire cast warm light over their tired faces.

"I could have gone with him." Bellamy almost sounded indignant.

"You spent all day walking without food or water and last night in a cage, I think you can rest." She stepped by him, planning to check on the pair who'd been dehydrated earlier. It had been hard over the night, trying to get them rehydrate even while they were burning through water because they were hiking yet again.

Bellamy didn't follow her, and didn't try to talk to her again; maybe he'd picked up on how she was kind of trying to avoid him. Not on purpose, Bellamy was the last person she wanted to alienate herself from. But she didn't know what to say to him, didn't know how to deal with the feelings of guilt and remorse over what he'd suffered in the mountain. Originally she hadn't wanted to send him in; she should have listened to that instinct and found another way. Maybe things would have turned out differently and there wouldn't be five hundred dead bodies in Mount Weather that were her responsibility.

Despite Ashlan's insistence that no grounders would come in here, she felt too uneasy to sit by the fire with everyone else—most of whom had fallen asleep anyway—so she sat a little way off with a borrowed gun, facing out into the surrounding structure and forest, acting as a kind of lookout.

Not even an hour had gone by when Ashlan returned—empty handed and moving quickly. She stood and went to meet him. As soon as he was close enough to see his grim expression, she already knew what he was going to tell her.

"Echo and her men followed us after all." Her mind was already trying to work out how they were going to escape again.

Ashlan stopped in front of her, his breath short. "I'm not sure, I didn't see Echo, and I didn't get close enough to identify any of the men. But it was definitely some kind of hunting party, and they weren't looking for animals."

"I know you said we'd be safe here, but I'm not so sure. I think we need to move."

He nodded. "You may be right, these men seemed very familiar with this area, they might know the paths through these ruins. We should run, and if we split up, it'll make it harder for them to catch us."

Voices echoed far off in the distance, but still sounding closer than she expected and she glanced toward the calls, noticing that the sky had a very faint tinge of gray to it. Dawn was coming, which meant they were about to lose any advantage they might have gained by hiding in the dark.

"We don't have much time," Ashlan confirmed.

She nodded, before heading back over to the small camp. Despite her ordering him to rest, Bellamy hadn't even laid down. Neither Octavia or Lincoln had rested either.

"There's a hunting party of grounders coming, we need to go," Clarke said as she stopped in front of them.

Octavia muttered something in grounder, but Clarke could guess from the expression on her face it'd probably been something along the lines of _I told you so_.

Bellamy's expression tightened, but he didn't say anything as he pushed to his feet and went around with Kane and Lincoln to wake people up. Ashlan hurriedly doused the fire and then set about covering the smoking cinders. The tarps with quickly pulled down and any other sign of their camp removed.

Ashlan started splitting people up, murmuring instructions and pointing out specific directions.

"What's going on?" Bellamy asked as Ashlan came over to him and Octavia.

"We're splitting up," Ashlan said in a voice that left no room for argument. "Go parallel with this wall. Stay at least six paces out from it, but don't stray more than eight. When you get to the end of the wall, immediately go left and head into the forest. From there the ground will be fine. Tondc is only a few hours up river; we'll all meet back there."

Bellamy looked at her, catching her with his dark eyes, expression troubled. "You really think splitting up is the best option?"

"Bel, we don't have time to stand here and debate this," Octavia put in before she could answer. "Split up or don't split up, I don't care. I'm leaving."

She nodded to Lincoln and the two of them headed along the wall, falling into a jog, keeping parallel to the crumbling bricks just like Ashlan had instructed.

"Octavia is right," Ashlan said. "We should go. I'll take one group and see you back at Tondc."

He stepped forward and surprise shot through her as he wrapped one arm around her and gave her a quick hug. He moved back again, and then turned, leading a group of four off into the opposite direction that Octavia had gone.

"You two catch up with Octavia and Lincoln," Kane said, nodding to where the pair had disappeared a few moments ago. "I'll take these last three another way."

For half a second she thought about protesting, Kane didn't have anywhere near as much experience on the ground, but he had another one of the original hundred with him, who'd obviously joined the guard in the last few weeks since getting out of Mount Weather. Plus, she hadn't forgotten who Kane really was. The less time she had to spend with him, the better.

So instead she nodded. "Make sure you go exactly where Ashlan told you."

The distant voices echoed closer as Kane carefully but quickly set off with the others.

"Come on." Bellamy gave a quick tug on her sleeve, before turning to run along the wall. She fell into step just behind him, trying to watch where she was putting her feet in the last of the night shadows, while making sure they didn't veer too close or too far from the wall, and trying to spot Octavia and Lincoln ahead of them.

The next shouts from the grounders sounded closer, like maybe they were just on the opposite side of the wall. Her heart rate picked up, as Bellamy increased his speed, and she pushed her legs to keep up with him. As they came to the end of the wall, torch light flared in the near distance, directly where Ashlan had told them to head into the forest.

Instead of going left at the end of the wall like Ashlan had said, Bellamy suddenly went right. Her next few breaths were too shallow in her tight chest as she leaped forward to catch up with him.

"Bellamy!" She managed to grab the back of his jacket, stopping him. He turned to her, but he didn't look down at her, instead he was looking past her, no doubt at the flickering and shifting of the torches in the steadily lightening forest. "Ashlan said to go left, he told me the ground was unstable here. We have to go back."

Bellamy glanced at her, his lips pressing together. "We can't get out the way he planned, we'll have to go all the way back to where the camp was."

"Then we better hurry." She started to turn, but Bellamy closed a hand around her arm and pulled her back.

She was about to asked him _what the hell_ , but then saw grounders coming from both sides of the wall. She stepped back, bumping into Bellamy's chest behind her. The grounders hadn't seen them yet, but it was just a matter of time. And there was no where to go. Either they took on an entire hunting party of men intent on catching them for Lexa, or they risked the unstable ground Ashlan had warned her about.

"Clarke." Bellamy tugged on her upper arm, making the decision for her. Just as they turned and started running deeper into the ruins, one of the grounders spotted them and yelled, alerting the others. As they scrambled across the uneven ground, vaulting fallen logs, rusting beams, and piles of crumbling bricks, she saw what Ashlan had been so concerned about; huge gaping holes where the earth had opened up into who-knew what kind of cavity below.

She started to slow, apprehension washing through her that they were going to run right into one of those holes, seeming more dangerous than the grounders who were lagging way behind them.

"Bellamy, I think we should—" The rest of her sentence got lost as everything solid beneath her feet suddenly crumbled into nothingness. Only two steps ahead of her, Bellamy threw his arms out as though trying to catch his balance, but there was nothing to grab onto as the ground sucked them under into a pitch black void.

 


	13. Chapter 13

Bellamy coughed, dust coating the back of his throat and making it hard to breath. He'd fallen hard and everything hurt, the impact aching through his whole body. He blinked, not able to make out much from the weak, gray pre-dawn light coming in from the hole above him. He pushed up to sit, but couldn't get any further, his leg stuck and sending pain radiating up into his hip and back. Glancing down, he found his leg pinned just above his ankle under a log, though it'd been worked smooth, like maybe it was actually a pole. He clenched his teeth, clamping a hand on his thigh and riding out the pain until it subsided back to a manageable level.

To distract himself from the fact he might be trapped, he searched his surrounds again, looking for Clarke. He couldn't see her, only forest debris and farther away, shadowy shapes he couldn't identify.

"Clarke." He coughed again, his voice strained and hoarse.

He wasn't even sure she'd gone down with him, she'd lagged behind a little when they'd been running. But surely if she was still up on solid ground, she would have been at the edge of the hole calling for him herself… unless the grounders had caught her.

"Clarke!" He yelled louder, panic starting to claw into him.

"I'm here." Her voice echoed out of the darkness, sounding just as rough as his and followed by a cough.

He blew out a relieved breath and shifted, copping another surge of pain from his leg.

"Are you okay?" This time, his voice actually wavered, the thought of Clarke being injured fraying what little calm he was holding onto.

"I'm okay." It sounded as though she was slowly moving toward him, her voice echoing differently, while debris shifted like pebbles skittering. "What about you?"

He stared down at his leg, even just looking at it making it hurt worse. "I'm not sure."

Clarke didn't answer, and when he looked up, he found her scrambling over the pole to land by his side. She was covered in dust and had a long scratch down the side of her face weeping blood, but other than that, she looked fine.

"Are you injured?" She put a hand on his shoulder, her gaze sweeping over him.

He nodded his chin downward. "My leg, it's stuck."

She glanced over, before moving to take a closer look. "It could be broken, but I won't know until we get this log off it. I think if I can get something to lever underneath…"

She looked around, before getting up and carefully walking a little way off into the shadows. A moment later she returned with a length of rusted steel about the size of her forearm, but twice as long.

Setting the end of makeshift prybar under the log just left of his foot, she paused and looked down at him. "This is going to be painful. I don't know how far I'm going to be able to lift it, so once you feel the pressure lessening, you need to pull your leg out, no matter how much it hurts."

He nodded and clamped his teeth together, hoping he didn't scream like a sissy when she started. Every muscle in his body tensed with anxious anticipation as Clarke started pushing down on the bar. For a second he thought she wasn't going to be able to do it, but then he felt the weight lifting off his leg, sending what felt like a thousand nails pounding through his shin and thigh, and reverberating up into his back.

As soon as there was enough room, he yanked his leg out, but only managed to roll sideways, fighting the dark of unconsciousness eating away at the edges of his vision.

"Bellamy." Clarke's hands were on him, gentle as they helped him roll onto his back and then smoothed the hair off his forehead.

"I'm okay, I just need a minute." He sucked in a couple of sharp breaths, willing the pain to back the hell off.

"I think your leg is broken. I mean, I obviously can't be sure without an x-ray, but it seems pretty likely—"

Her words cut off as voices echoed somewhere above them. More light was starting to filter into the hole as the sun came up, leaving them in a kind of spotlight.

"We can't stay here, if they come over to check out this hole, they'll see us." Even as he said the words, the idea of moving any time soon was almost enough to make him light headed.

"You can't go anywhere, not until I get a splint on that leg." Her expression was classic stubborn Clarke as she frowned at him.

"Look, princess, you can play doctor on me all you want once we move away from the edge of this hole so the grounders don't spot us."

She sent him a look that said she didn't appreciate his sarcasm or the use of her nickname, but nonetheless, shifted around to get her shoulder under his arm to help him up.

Just like he'd feared, the slightest movement to his leg burned like a son of a bitch, and it was all he could do not to groan as Clarke helped get him upright. They hobbled deeper into the shadows, and by the time they'd gone a few short meters, a cold sweat had broken out all over his body.

"This is far enough," Clarke panted, probably having trouble managing his weight since she was pretty much the only thing keeping him up.

For half a second he thought about disagreeing, about going just a little bit further to be safe, but the pain sliced sharper, so he gave a shallow nod and let her lower him back to the ground.

She'd found a beam to lean him against, and he slouched against it, sweat dripping down the side of his face as Clarke examined his injured leg again.

"Well, the good news is, I don't think we made it any worse." She sat back and glanced around.

He followed her gaze, actually able to see now that the sun was definitely coming up. Everywhere the ground had collapsed acted kind of like a skylight, letting in enough light so that they could see most of the surroundings. The space had probably once been the basement level of whatever building had been above them. There were even the skeletal remains of huge, rusted out shelves, rows and rows of them as though something had been stored down here.

Clarke gave a short sigh, before pushing to her feet again. "I can't do much about the pain until we get you back to Camp Jaha, but if I get it into a splint, it should feel a little bit better."

She spent a few moments searching around, picking up and discarding all sorts of sticks and lengths of steel until she found one she was apparently happy with. As she returned, the grounder's voices echoed again, sounding like they were right above them. Clarke dropped down next to him, her expression pensive as she looked back at the hole they'd created when they'd fallen into this cavern.

He reached over and caught her hand, twining their fingers together. She turned back to him, a half-smile kicking up her lips for a second. The minutes seemed to crawl by while the grounders searched the area above them. At one point, three shadows fell across their hole, but whoever they belonged to didn't come down, and not long after, they moved off, though were still close enough to hear them calling back and forth.

Clarke blew out a relieved sounding breath, before shrugging out of her jacket.

"Hopefully they won't come back." She turned her back on him before drawing her shirt off in one quick movement, leaving her only in a black bra. Not that he saw anything besides the modest back straps. And despite the pain turning his insides to mush, his breath still caught at the sight of her slender waist and all that pale, perfect skin.

However, in another second, she was pulling her jacket back on again, fastening it up all the way to her chin as she turned back to him.

"Okay, let's get that leg seen to." She pulled a small knife from somewhere and started cutting her shirt into shreds. "I'll try to be gentle, but this is still probably going to hurt a little."

"Where do you think that'll land on a scale from _ouch_ to _oh-god-kill-me-now_?"

As he'd hoped, she smiled at his joke, before moving to position the bar next to his leg. "Now, I need you to stay as still as possible."

He nodded, but she didn't see, since she was leaning over his leg. With careful touches, she got everything ready, her movements efficient.

"I'm going to start tying the material to secure the splint, this is where things are going to get hard."

"Just do it, Clarke, I'll be fine." He tried to make his voice sound convincing, but considering the way pain had thinned it, he didn't know if he'd quite made the mark.

She took a deep breath as she grabbed hold of the first strip of material. Without warning, she yanked it tight, quickly knotting it before moving onto the next. By the time she'd finished, his breath was choppy and a second cold-sweat was dampening his entire body. She moved back to sit next to him, her face drawn.

"Are you okay?"

He couldn't manage anything except a nod, cold shudders ripping through his body. If he could get warm, he'd be fine, but this damn cavern was near-on freezing. Clarke laid a hand against his cheek, her eyes searching over him.

"Bellamy, I think you're going into shock."

He focused on her face as the shudders rocked him deeper. "And what's your solution for that, doc?"

For a long moment she stared at him, and he could almost see her intelligent mind working behind her eyes.

"As soon as those grounder are gone, I'm going to search for a way out of here. In the meantime, can you scoot forward a little?"

Not sure what she had in mind now, he clenched his jaw and shifted himself forward. As soon as he'd moved away from the beam behind him, Clarke slipped into the space, wrapping her arms around him and then urging him to lean back against her.

He settled back against her, feeling warmth seep into him right away from everywhere they touched.

"Just try to relax, take some deep breaths and don't think about the pain," she said, her voice close to his right ear.

"You do this with all your patients?" He let his eyes slide closed, taking her advice and focusing on the feel of her arms around him instead of the dull pain radiating up his leg.

"I'm sure you're waiting for me to say something cliché like _only the special ones_."

"I'm not special? Way to break a guy's heart."

She gave a short laugh. "I'm sure you'll survive it."

For a moment they were both silent, listening as the grounder's voices gradually got father away.

"What are we going to do if you can't find us a way out of here?" He hated to voice the fear aloud, but the question had to be asked.

"It'll be okay." It sounded like she wanted to be more sure of that fact that she was. "When we don't turn up at Tondc in a few hours, Ashlan will come back for us. Probably Octavia and Lincoln too."

He reached down and covered her hand where it was resting lightly on his stomach. She was right; the others would come for them if they couldn't get out themselves. Still, something about the seemingly unending cavern sent a chill down his spine.

However, getting out wasn't even their biggest problem. Once they made it back to solid ground, he was going to become a liability in trying to evade the grounders searching for them, and by his calculation, they were still two days walk from Camp Jaha. Things weren't looking good, but if he had to face them with anyone, he was glad it was Clarke by his side.


	14. Chapter 14

A sharp ache in Clarke's arm woke her from the doze she'd fallen into. She tried to shift, but something warm and heavy was pinning her in place. She blinked open her eyes, flexing her hand at the pins and needles, glancing down to see that Bellamy was totally out of it, his face pale and hairline damp with sweat. He was still leaning against her, which was why her arm had gone numb, but now that he was asleep, he weighed a ton. She grimaced, shifting to gently move his heavier frame off her, but trying not to wake him up. His broken leg would hurt like hell, so sleeping was probably the best thing for him right now.

She looked up at the hole they'd fallen through, gauging from the sunlight and shadows that it must be about the middle of the day. Must have been a few hours at least that she'd dozed. She hadn't meant to, but with Bellamy leaning against her, trying to warm him out of totally going into shock, plus the fact she hadn't slept for the past two nights, she'd nodded off without even realizing she was sleepy.

Hopefully by now, Ashlan and the others would have reached Tondc and realized they were missing, because she had no idea how she was going to get Bellamy out of this ginormous cavern all on her own.

Standing, she stretched with a small groan, her body aching. While she'd been lucky in the fall that she had sustained any serious injury, she still had a whole bunch of bruises and strains, plus she must have wrenched her shoulder at some point, because if she moved her arm a certain way, it sent an ache radiating across her left shoulder blade and down her arm into her elbow.

Voices echoed, and she dropped into a crouch next to Bellamy, before freezing in place, holding her breath. It was probably her imagination, but those voices had sounded like they'd come from somewhere down here, not above where the grounders had been searching for the earlier.

The noise came again, sending her heart racing, because she hadn't heard wrong, the voices were bouncing off the walls in a way that meant they had to be coming from below, not above.

She scooted forward and glanced around the beam she'd leaned Bellamy against. While she couldn't see the grounders, between shafts of light coming down from various holes in the ground, a few flickers of orange - like torches - danced in the far-off darkness. If the grounders had an easy way of getting down here to search for them, then that mean there was an easy way for them to get out. All they had to do was avoid getting caught.

She turned back to Bellamy and gently shook his shoulder, wishing she didn't have to wake him up, but they needed to find somewhere to hide before the grounders got any closer.

"Bellamy," she whispered, shaking him a bit harder when he didn't rouse fast enough. Finally, he lifted his head, a wince of pain crossing his features.

"Clarke?"

She dropped her hand over his mouth and motioned for him to stay quiet, listening for a long moment to work out if the grounders had heard them. When no yell of alarm sounded, she lowered her hand and leaned in closer to him.

"The grounders are down here, we need to hide."

"Help me up then." He held out an arm and together they managed to get him on his feet. His breathing was harsh and face set in hard lines—it must have hurt, but he didn't make a sound.

She wanted to take things slow to make sure he was okay and they didn't put the splint out of place, but they didn't have the time. Instead, they staggered deeper into the shadows, Bellamy leaning more and more on her the farther they went. They passed several rows of skeletal shelving, and then found some that had fallen into one another and actually maintained some of the cladding. Ducking down, she looked into the dark space, but couldn't see anything. She really hoped there wasn't some kind of animal living in there.

"It'll have to do, Clarke. They're getting closer and I can't go much farther," Bellamy whispered in puffed snatches.

She didn't really like it, but at this point they had no other choice. Helping Bellamy get to the ground, she took a quick moment to check his splint before he side-shuffled into the space, disappearing into the darkness. After a second, she crouched down and went in after him. In the inky blackness, she could only just make out his form. Something touched her hand and she jumped before she realized it was just Bellamy, wrapping his fingers around hers.

Looking outward, she slowed her breathing, listening to the sounds of the grounders getting closer. From this angle, she could just make out the hole they'd fallen through, and after a moment, four grounders approached it, spending a few moments studying the debris and talking between themselves.

They moved off, out of sight, and she had no idea which direction they'd gone in. From the way the voices echoed, it was nearly impossible to tell where the grounders were, or if they were getting closer to their hiding spot. She shifted back even farther, bumping up against Bellamy's side. His other hand landed on her shoulder, steadying her.

It seemed ridiculous that after fighting side by side with the grounders, after the tenuous alliance they'd struck, after thinking they finally might be able to coexist in some kind of peace, they were running and hiding from the grounders yet again. She intended to find out whatever Lexa wanted from them, but she was going to do it on her own terms, not let herself or any of her friends get dragged in to face Lexa like they were some kind of criminals.

After a while, the voices definitely sounded like they were moving off. This might be her chance to find a way out of here. She started to move, but Bellamy tightened his hold on her.

"Clarke, what are you doing?" he whispered, his voice strained in the darkness.

"I'm going to follow them to see how they got in. I'm hoping to find an easy way of getting us out of here."

"You can't, its too dangerous. What if they—?"

"I'll be fine, Bellamy. This place is huge, if I don't follow the grounders to see which way they go, we could be stuck down here for days looking for an escape route. Just stay here, I'll be back for you as soon as I find the way out."

Instead of letting her go, Bellamy yanked her closer, pulling her off balance so she ended up basically falling against him. His arms closed around her, holding her tight for a long moment.

"Be careful, please," he said into her hair.

She nodded against his shoulder, not trusting herself to open her mouth in case she said something totally unhelpful like how much she'd missed him these past couple weeks, or that being around him kind of hurt, or that she knew what had happened to him in the mountain and didn't ever know how she was going to make up for it.

"Seriously," he said after a silent moment. "If anything happens to you, I'm totally screwed, so make sure you come back."

She leaned back from him, smoothing her hand over his shoulder, up his neck to his jaw. In the darkness, she couldn't see the concerned way he was probably staring at her, but she could feel the tension in him.

"I'll come back, I promise." Maybe it was a stupid thing to say, they both knew any number of things could happen. But she couldn't leave Bellamy sitting here injured in the dark without him knowing that she'd do everything in her power to help him and if she didn't come back, it'd probably be because she was dead.

She felt him nod, before he caught her fingers, pulling her hand away from his face, but briefly pressing a kiss into her palm.

Her breath caught in her chest as he let her hand go again, her heart racing a little faster as she turned away from him and shuffled out of the darkened space. Though her mind wanted to linger on that startling moment when his lips had touched her skin, she forced herself to listen, gauging the directions of the grounders and then setting off to find them. As she moves along the edge of the desiccated shelving, she saw chalky kind of sandstone rocks littering the ground. Bending down, she picked a couple up, and as she moved farther away from Bellamy, started marking her path by scoring a white mark on slabs of concrete or fallen beams, or anything else that wasn't too obvious, but would highlight her path back to Bellamy once she'd found the way out.

She only hoped the grounders gave up their search long before nightfall, otherwise she might not be able to see the marks she was leaving to find her way back. And however the grounders had gotten down here, she prayed it was safe and stable enough to take Bellamy out through, because with his broken leg, they could end up stuck down here cornered like rats, hoping Ashlan found them before the grounders did. If she could just get Bellamy to the surface, then they'd be safer.

In the back of her mind, a little voice kept telling her that if she stashed Bellamy somewhere, she could go for help, bring back Ashlan, Octavia and Lincoln to get him out. But she couldn't do it, couldn't leave him alone in an underground prison while the grounders were still searching the area, not after everything that had happened to him, everything that was her fault.

This time, she wouldn't put Bellamy at risk, not for any reason.


	15. Chapter 15

Bellamy hated the dark. He hated the dust getting up his nose every time he breathed in. He hated every skittering noise coming from deeper in the shelves, no doubt made by something of the rodent variety. He hated the stupid unstable ground that had landed him in here in the first place. He hated Lexa and the grounders who were after them yet again. But most of all he hated his damn stupid broken leg, keeping him exactly where Clarke had left him hours ago and hurting like a mother every time he moved even the slightest bit.

Really, this whole invalid thing had gotten old about five seconds after Clarke had helped him pull his leg out from beneath that steel beam.

The sunlight coming through the holes had started slanting in long shafts across the ground, the temperature quickly dropping. Night was coming fast, and he hadn't seen or heard any sign that Clarke was still down in this godforsaken basement.

For a while it'd been okay, the pain had kept him distracted and it'd been easy to keep himself convinced that she'd be back with news they had a way out any second now. But as the afternoon had worn on, the day getting later and later, he'd started coming up with reasons why she could be taking so long, that had eventually led into worrying about all the things that could have happened to her, and ending with him starting to come up with plans of how he was supposed to get himself and his busted-ass leg out of this damn hole. Because he sure as hell wasn't going to spend the night down here.

A while ago he'd armed himself with a short, sharp-tipped bar, shoving it up his sleeve to conceal it. After that, he'd shuffled around until he'd found a long sturdy, piece of wood he planned on using as a crutch, taking his jacket off and wrapping around the top to cushion his underarm.

Now that the light was starting to turn a deeper orange-gold, telling him that the sun was about to set, he didn't plan on waiting around for Clarke any longer. Surely she would have been back by now. The basement or cavern or whatever it was couldn't have been that big. Something must have happened to her, the grounders must have worked out she was following them. Even now, she might be on her way to Polis, forced to face Lexa with no one to back her up.

He shuffled over to a nearby tilted shelf and clamped a hand on it, giving it a good shake to make sure it wasn't going to collapse on him. When it seemed to be sturdy, he sucked in a short breath and clenched his jaw, using the shelf and his newly-made crutch to get himself upright. His leg pulsed with pain, sharp spasms stabbing upward all the way into his back. By the time he got on his feet, everything was tilting like he'd spun around in about five hundred circles. He closed his eyes and waited for the dizziness to settle, glad he hadn't eaten anything all day as his stomach churned.

"Going somewhere?"

He opened his eyes, relieved to find everything had stopped spinning and he hadn't imagined that question. Clarke stood a few steps away from him, her arms crossed and regarding him with a faintly exasperated expression.

"I was coming to rescue you. Figured you must have needed it since you weren't back yet."

"Sorry." A flash of frustration crossed her features as she stepped closer to him. "This cavern goes on for ages, like it was several buildings worth of basement. The grounders spent all afternoon searching it, and only just went above ground about fifteen minutes ago. The way out isn't that far off, but I spent all day walking in circles."

"At least you found it. No way do I want to spend the night stuck down here."

She shifted closer and then motioned to his side where he held the crutch. "You've been busy."

He hobbled a step forward, and managed to keep himself from wincing at the pain throbbing through the entire left half of his body. Or maybe not. Clarke sent him a sympathetic look and then grabbed his other arm, putting it over her shoulder and then helping him take another step. At least with her taking some of his weight, it was a little easier.

"Sitting around waiting to be rescued got boring pretty quickly." His words were clipped, breath already getting short despite the fact they'd only walked a few meters.

"Come on, now, Bellamy, I thought you made a good damsel in distress."

He cut her an unimpressed look, but couldn't hold it as Clarke shot him a quick smile. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen her smile, or even look the least bit happy for that matter. Life on the ground sucked, but for her, it had sucked even worse. Those first few days and weeks after they'd come down on the dropship, when the two of them had butted heads over leadership, neither of them could have ever imagined what would come of it. He wondered if she'd known the terrible price of the responsibility she'd taken on, would she have still stood up, or left it to someone else? But the question was pointless, because the answer was obvious. Clarke would always try to do the right thing no matter the cost to herself.

Clarke pressed a hand to the middle of his chest, helping keep him up as they continued forward. For half a second he thought about making a joke along the lines of if-she'd-wanted-to-get-her-hands-on-him-she-should-have-said-so, but kept his mouth shut. The old him would have said something stupid at a time like this to help deal with the tension, but he wasn't that guy any more—the one who'd shot the chancellor for a chance to get on the ground with his sister. And Clarke definitely deserved better than him disrespecting her with that kind of lame humor.

While neither of them had brought it up, he was quite aware she could have simply left him down here to go and find help. It probably would have been the smarter thing to do, for her at least. But since she hadn't mentioned the possibility, he wasn't about to suggest it, since watching her walk away from him again would probably be enough to shove him right over the edge. And he'd seen first hand the results of someone doing that when Finn had shot up half that grounder village.

"Okay, this is where things are going to get a little harder." Clarke paused, sounding a bit out of breath as well. She let go of him, and he balanced on the crutch, watching in the last of the fading light as she stepped forward and shoved what looked to be some kind of old door, thick and heavy. It groaned and screeched as it moved over the floor, and must have weighed a ton. Clarke only just managed to get it open far enough for them to both slip through. But more light came in, as if it opened directly up to the sky.

Feeling a new burst of energy at the prospect of getting out of here, he hopped forward on the crutch and looked in, finding an old concrete stairwell, strewn with dirt and leaves. But just like he'd guessed, there wasn't any roof, the stairs going up into nothing but open forest.

"You go first; the door will swing shut if I let it go."

He nodded and then maneuvered himself and his crutch through the opening and onto the first stair, getting used to keeping his injured leg still. It was either that or knock himself out from constant, brain-melting pain if he accidentally moved or bumped it. Once he was through, Clarke stepped in and let the door go, and it creaked shut on its own, just like she'd said. She squeezed past him on the step and then went up two above him, before turning and holding out her hand.

Bracing himself, because there was going to be no way to do this without it hurting like a bitch, he grabbed her hand and set the crutch on the next step, clenching his teeth over swearing as he hopped up and dragged his injured leg with him. He forced himself straight onto the next step, shutting down his mind to everything except the stubborn determination to get up the stairs. Sweat broke out all over his body, but pain wracked cold shudders through him every now and then. Just over half way up, he was finding it too hard to catch his breath, like his lungs weren't working properly anymore.

"Bellamy, stop." Clarke pressed a hand into his shoulder to stop him from tackling the next step. "Just rest for a second."

"If I stop, Clarke, I won't make it. We're almost there—"

"I mean it, Bellamy. You look like you're about to pass out. And if you fall backward, you'll be too heavy for me to catch. We can deal with a broken leg, but if you do any more damage to yourself, we'll end up stuck here."

He leaned into the wall, trying to catch his breath, trying to force back the blackness threatening to overtake his vision and suck him into oblivion. This was ridiculous. A few measly steps and he was almost killing himself trying to get up them. It shouldn't be this hard, if his damned leg didn't hurt so much—

He pushed upright again, frustration sending a fresh wave of energy through him. "We're almost there. Come on; let's get this over and done with."

Her lips pressed together, and he could tell by the way her blue eyes flashed as she glanced away from him that she wanted to argue some more. But instead she simply nodded and stepped forward to help him again.

The remaining stairs went by in a blur as he forced himself to breathe through the pain and not pass out, the only thing keeping him lucid was the fact he'd take Clarke down with him if he fell since she'd squeezed in next to his side to help him up the last few steps. When they finally made it to the top, they collapsed in a heap onto the leaf-strewn ground. Bellamy rolled onto his back, sucking in deep lungfuls of the cold air, staring up at the shadowed canopy of the forest above them, the first stars beginning to come out now that the sun had gone down.

"How about we just camp here for the night?" Clarke said between panting breaths. "Like right here, in this exact spot. We don't need a fire, right?"

He gave a short, relieved laugh, never so glad to have finished climbing a stupid set of stairs in his entire life. "Yeah, we could stay here, except knowing our luck, one of us will roll over in our sleep and end up at the bottom again."

Clarke groaned, before sitting up. "Good point. Come on, we'll shelter near the wall like we did last night."

His whole body ached in protest at just the thought of moving again. "Give me a minute."

Clarke started to nod, but then froze, before glancing over her shoulder.

"Did you hear that?" she whispered.

Pushing himself up to sit, he swept a glance around the surrounding forest. He hadn't heard anything, but then again, his head was throbbing and ears all but ringing from battling the constant pain.

Clarke reached into her pocket and pulled out a small knife, before rising to her feet in front of him, looking for all the world like she intended to protect him from whatever might be out there.

Forms melted out of the shadows, and a potent kind of futile anger rushed through him. After everything, the grounders were going to get them. He let the sharp rod in his sleeve slip forward, and had started trying to work out how he was going to get himself on his feet to fight next to Clarke, when something about the figures registered as familiar.

"Ashlan!" Clarke leaped forward, running the few steps separating them and meeting the grounder in an embrace. Ashlan wrapped his arms around her and said something in a low voice, something that made her laugh for a second. They held onto each other for another long moment, long enough to make Bellamy want to stab someone with his hidden weapon, before they broke apart again.

"Bellamy, what the hell happened to you?" He looked up to see Octavia standing over him, hands on her hips with Lincoln next to her as usual.

"We took an unexpected detour. Help me up."

Lincoln stepped forward and clasped his forearm, bracing his feet wide as he easily hauled him up. Bellamy took a second to balance himself on his crutch, not letting himself look to where Clarke and Ashlan were still standing close together, talking. After a moment, the pair joined them, Clarke looking him up and down in that doctor-way she did sometimes.

"We need to make some kind of stretcher for Bellamy, his leg is broken."

"I've got a crutch, I'll be fine. You don't need to carry me." To prove it, he took a step. Yeah, it hurt, but not as much as going up those stairs had.

"Don't be stubborn, you're in pain. Let us help you."

"She's right, Bellamy," Ashlan put in. "Its several hours to Tondc. We need to keep moving and we need to do it fast, there are still men in this area searching for you."

He sent Ashlan a hard glare. "I said I'll be fine."

Like hell he was going to lay on a stretcher and let Clarke's superhero grounder carry him anywhere. Octavia was giving him a look that told him she thought he was being an idiot, so he turned away from her, making himself take another step, and then shift the crutch forward. Maybe he couldn't go all that fast, but he would walk to Tondc on his own.

"Come on, you said we need to move." He glanced over his shoulder to see they were all watching him like he was some kind of sideshow entertainment. Clarke had her arms crossed and was staring at him with obvious frustrated disapproval, while Octavia shrugged and stepped forward as though she didn't really care either way. Both Lincoln and Ashlan wore similar impassive expressions like it was some kind of grounder trademark look.

As they set off, Lincoln and Octavia fell into step behind him, while Ashlan moved forward to lead the way through the darkening forest. Clarke came up next to him, her expression still peeved.

"For the record, I think you're being an ass."

She didn't wait for him to reply, but brushed past him to walk next to Ashlan, not offering him a hand, or arm, or shoulder like she had when they'd been down in the cavern. So, what? Ashlan turned up and suddenly she had better things to do?

He glared at the back of Ashlan's head as he lurched along with his crutch. He still hadn't gotten the story about how Clarke and Ashlan had come to know each other, and while the grounder seemed all helpful where Clarke was concerned, there was something about the guy he didn't trust.

Why was Ashlan so chummy with her when most grounders either hated her, or wanted them all captured for Lexa? The question seared itself into his brain. He needed answers. Whatever the deal with Ashlan was, he intended to find out sooner rather than later, because after everything she'd been through, the last thing Clarke needed was to be hurt again. Maybe it wasn't his responsibility to protect her from that, but he'd seen the shadows she got in her eyes whenever anyone mentioned Lexa. The grounders were to blame for more than a small amount of the problems they'd faced since landing on earth, and if he could save Clarke from any more trouble, then he sure as hell was making it his responsibility.

 


	16. Chapter 16

Getting to Tondc turned out to be far more frustrating than Clarke thought it was going to be. Besides Bellamy being a stubborn idiot over his leg and insisting he could walk himself, there seemed to be half an army worth of grounders searching the forest for them. Too many times they had to change directions, double back or find somewhere to hide so they could avoid the hunting parties.

It had been a long night, but now the terrain was beginning to look familiar. They had to be less than an hour from Tondc, but there was yet another group of grounders between them and where they wanted to go. They'd stopped in a shallow, dry creek bed, concealing themselves under some overhanging branches.

"We're not going to be safe at Tondc, are we?" Clarke whispered to Ashlan, who stood beside her as they watched through the leaves where the grounders were sweeping the area.

Ashlan shook his head. "No, which is why I sent Kane and the others back to the _skaikru_ camp before I came looking for you."

Which meant the smart thing to do would be for her to return to Camp Jaha as well. When she'd walked away, she hadn't exactly had a time frame in mind of how long she needed before she could look at the remaining survivors of the original hundred and not feel like her insides were melting in acid. But two weeks definitely wasn't long enough.

She sighed and shifted back, turning to where Bellamy sat propped up against a moss-covered rock. He had his eyes closed, the strain of his injured leg etched into his face in lines of exhaustion. She couldn't decide if she felt sorry for him being in so much pain and the fact she couldn't do anything else to help him, or just infuriated that he was being so obstinate about letting them carry him.

Reaching into the pack Ashlan always carried, she found a bladder of water before going over and dropping down next to Bellamy. He opened his eyes and looked at her as she settled next to him.

"Are we ready to move again?" he asked, his voice hoarse.

"No, not yet. Here, you need to have some water."

He took the bladder from her and looked around before taking a quick sip.

"Where's Octavia and Lincoln?"

"They went to scout a safe way to get around all the grounders standing between us and Tondc. Not that it's going to help much. We won't be safe until we get back inside the fence of Camp Jaha."

Bellamy glanced down at the water bladder in his hands. "So you're coming back with us?"

The question sounded casual, but she caught the tension beneath it.

"I don't know."

He brought his head up, disbelief and a touch of frustration in his gaze. "Clarke, it was one thing for you to go off on your own before, but now that we know Lexa is looking for you, it's too dangerous."

"I don't think Lexa wants to hurt me. And she's not after me, she wants all of us. Maybe if I go to Polis—"

He sat forward, dropping the water to the ground. "You are not going to face Lexa on your own, Clarke."

"I won't go on my own, I'll take Ashlan." She didn't know why she was suggesting it since she hadn't exactly thought about it. The plan was coming out of her mouth even as it was forming in her mind. Lexa was the last person she wanted to talk to, but it seemed a confrontation was inevitable. Eventually she would have to face the girl who'd betrayed her in every sense of the word.

Bellamy scoffed, the sound harsh. He leaned in even closer, his gaze slicing to Ashlan before returning to her. "And you think Ashlan will have your back? Are you forgetting what happened last time you trusted a grounder?"

A deep shaft of pain sliced right through her middle. "No, I haven't forgotten, but Ashlan—"

"Isn't like that?" He cut in. "Is that what you were going to say, Clarke? And how exactly do you know that? You met him, what, a week ago?"

She glanced away from him, his words like rubbing salt in an open wound. Was Bellamy right? Was she crazy for trusting Ashlan so quickly and easily after everything that had happened with Lexa?

Ashlan stepped over, crouching next to her for a moment, his hand landing on her shoulder, tight and reassuring. She hated the thought that she could be so wrong about him.

"I'm going to scout in the other direction from where Octavia and Lincoln went. I won't be long." Ashlan handed over his machete and she took the weapon with reluctance.

"If I've got this, what are you going to protect yourself with?"

His lips lifted in a quick smile. "The blade is only a tool, I am the weapon."

Before she could reply, he stood and slipped through a small gap between two branches.

" _I am the weapon_?" Bellamy repeated. "Really? Is he always so full of himself?"

She leveled a glare on him. "At least he's not walking around with a broken leg, refusing any help."

"Whatever," he muttered, shifting himself with a short grimace.

"Seriously, Bellamy, what is your problem with Ashlan? He hasn't done anything except help us."

"My problem isn't with Ashlan as much as it is with all the grounders and their habit of screwing us over." He avoided her gaze, staring off in the other direction, his expression tight.

"What, even Lincoln? You don't trust him either now?"

His gaze snapped back to her. "When I was in the mountain and I said that Maya helped me escape? The reason I'd been captured was because Lincoln sold me out for a hit of those reaper drugs."

That bald truth put a dent in everything she thought she knew about Lincoln. "Bellamy—"

"It wasn't his fault." He glanced away from her again, shoving a hand through his damp, tangled hair. "At the last minute he didn't want to go through with it. He thought it was a bad idea, but I pushed him. I had to get in there, had to succeed just like I'd promised you. I told him everything would be fine. What the hell did I know?"

Bellamy was right, nothing had turned out fine. He'd been tortured and then the two of them had pulled a lever that had killed over five hundred people.

"I'm sorry that happened to you." The words were totally inadequate, _sorry_ would never cover the guilt she felt for him being hung up and drained.

He sniffed, shaking his head slightly. "You can't keep walking around thinking you're the only one carrying a burden that seems too heavy to bear. I had my hand on the lever too. And as for Tondc, I understand the decision you made, even if some others don't."

A lance of shock jolted her. He knew about Tondc? But of course he did.

"Octavia told you. She told you I let those people die." Her words came out sounding hollow. He might say he understood, but how could he when she barely understood herself?

Bellamy looked up at her again, his eyes damp as he reached out and took her hand in a grip so tight it almost hurt. "It doesn't matter what Octavia told me, I'm glad she did, because I'm guessing you wouldn't have ever said anything."

"Because it's terrible, Bellamy, what I did—"

He pulled her closer, his expression intense. "What you did is save me, Clarke. Me and every one of our friends who were trapped inside the mountain. Don't let your guilt block out the fact that in the end you saved us all."

"But at what cost?" Her chest was tight, all the feelings she'd been trying to ignore, the emotions she'd been trying to escape when she'd walked away from Camp Jaha two weeks ago rising up within her, too fast and hard for her to control. And suddenly she couldn't hold it all in any longer. "Echo told me what happened to you, what Maya had to rescue you from. When I found out, do you know what I felt in that moment? I was _glad_ that I had killed them all for doing that to you. What sort of person does that make me, Bellamy?"

She couldn't catch her breath, throat tightening with a hard ache. Bellamy let her hand go, but reached up and cupped her face in his palms.

"It makes you human, Clarke. Just like me, just like all the grounders, and everyone in the mountain. We all made mistakes, and now we're all paying for them in different ways."

His words were like being given absolution, releasing the last barrier holding the floodgates closed. Tears welled in her eyes, blurring her vision before streaking down her cheeks, over Bellamy's fingers on her face.

He pulled her into him, and she let herself drop against his chest, the tears coming faster as a sob rose up within her, all the pressure, grief, and stress she'd been holding onto for what felt like forever coming free in a torrent.

"Its okay, Clarke, I got you."

She nodded against his chest, gripping his jacket in both fists and forcing herself to breathe through the overwhelming need to cry uncontrollably, until finally it started passing. Once the tears stopped, calm relief stole through her like a cool breeze on a hot day. She straightened, but didn't unclamp her hands from his jacket.

"Thank you," she murmured, her voice drained.

His hand came up to her face, his thumb brushing away some of the wetness and strands of hair that had stuck to her cheek. "Don't ever think you could do anything that would make me hate you. I get it, Clarke. I get _you_."

Even though Bellamy's hand had been on the lever with hers, she'd still felt alone since they'd walked out of the mountain, still felt like maybe it was more her responsibility than his. She'd been the one to shoot Wallace and threaten Cage, she'd been the one to order Monty to change the airflow system, she'd been willing to go through with it whether Bellamy helped her or not. And she might always feel that way, but right in that moment, she could see how all of her decisions, all of his decisions, and everything they'd done had formed an unbreakable bond between them. And that she wasn't so alone after all.

"I know I said it before, but I am sorry I walked away from you at the gates of Camp Jaha after we came out of the mountain. I just couldn't think, couldn't face any of it."

His lips lifted in a half-smile. "And that's the last time you're going to apologize for it. We all dealt with it the best we could. You needed time and space. Some of us got respectable and were offered a position on the new council."

She wiped both hands over her face, taking away the last of the tears.

"Let me guess; Monty. No, Octavia?" She was teasing, because after everything she wasn't surprised to find out the adults had realized what an asset to the leadership group Bellamy would be.

He shot her an unimpressed look. "Guess again."

"Lincoln? Jasper? You'll have to give me a clue, because there are like forty-four other names—"

"You're hilarious." He wrapped an arm around her and pulled her in next to him, before kissing her temple. She leaned into his side, resting her head on his shoulder, enjoying the simplicity of being with him and having no secrets or guilt between them any longer.

They still had more than a day's walk to get back to Camp Jaha and what seemed like an increasing number of grounders standing between them and safety. Once Ashlan, Lincoln and Octavia came back, they'd be on the move again and hopefully this time Bellamy wouldn't be so stubborn about them helping him.

 


End file.
